
Class C=J!^l2_ 
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lO/t/iA<Ci-Z'auA 



(-OJl/ 




THE MEANING OF 

MODERN LIFE 



AS SOUGHT FOR AND INTERPRETED IN A SERIES 
OF LECTURES AND ADDRESSES BY THE LEADERS 
OF MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN ACTION : : : 



THIS SERIES HAS BEEN ARRANGED IN 
SEQUENCE, AND EDITED WITH FORE- 
WORD, INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES BY 



CHARLES F. HORNE, Ph.D. 

Professor in the College of the City of New York 




ISSUED 


UNDER 


THE AUSPICES OF 


THE 


NATIONAL 


ALUMNI 


UNION 


SQUARE 




NEW YORK 



A 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 


Two Copies Received 


DEC 1 


1908 


OopyriKOt £«try 


OUS< 


XXfc NO, 


COPY 


3. 



Copyright igoy by The N^ational Alumni 



Racelv«d from 
Copyright Offfcti 



CONTENTS OF VOLUME 



Lecture 

I. THE OUTLOOK 

p^ " The Trend 0} the Century 

^ Seth Low, LL.D., 

Former President of Columbia University. 

II. THE DANGER 

Problems To Be Met 
Theodore Roosevelt, LL.D., 
President of the United States. 

III. THE BELIEFS 

Religion, Science, and Miracle 
Sir Oliver Lodge, LL.D., 

President University of Birmingham, England. 

IV. THE SUCCESSES 

Five American Contributions to Civilization 
Charles W. Eliot, LL.D., 

President of Harvard University. 

V. THE BEGINNINGS 

The Man of the Past 
E. Kay Robinson. 

VI. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

Its Chemical Creation by Science 
John Butler Burke, M.A., 
Cambridge University. 

VII. THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

Morality of Nature 

Prince Peter Alexievitch Kropotkin. 

VIII. THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

Growth of Modern Idea of Animals 
Countess E. Martinengo Cesaresco. 
[3] 



CONTENTS 

Lecture 

IX. THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

Evolution and Marriage 

Alfred R. Wallace, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S. 

X. THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE 

Scientific Investigation and Progress 
Ira Remsen, LL.D., 

President of Johns Hopkins University 

XL OUR COUNTRY 

The Making of the Nation 
WooDRow Wilson, LL.D., 

President of Princeton University. 

Xil. PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS 

The Duties of Good Citizenship 

His Eminence James, Cardinal Gibbons. 

XIII. AMBITION 

The Conditions of Success 
Max Nordau, M.D., '' 

President of Congress of Zionists. 

XIV. OUR PAST 

The Lesson of the Past 
Maurice Maeterlinck. 

XV. ART 

The What and the How in Art 

William Dean Howells, A.M., L.H.D.. 

XVI. ART AND MORALITY 

Their Essential Union for Culture 
Ferdinand Brunetiere, LL.D., 

Ex-President of L'Acad^mie Frangaise. 

XVII. WOMAN 

Marriage Customs and Their Moral Value 

Elizabeth Diack, 

William S. Lilly, M.A., J.P., 

Secretary of the Catholic Society of Great Britain. 

[4] 



CONTENTS 

Lecture 

XVIII. UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

The Essential Equality 0} Man and Woman 
' Frances Cobbe, 
William K. Hill. 

XIX. SOCIETY 

The Role of Women in Society 
Lady Mary Ponsonby. 

XX. THE CHILD 

The Beginnings of the Mind 
H. G. Wells, B.Sc. 

XXI. LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

Language as the Interpreter of Life 
Benjamin Ide Wheeler, LL.D., 

President of the University of California. 

XXII. THE BOY 

His Preparation for Manhood 
Daniel Coit Oilman, LL.D., 

Former President of Johns Hopkins University 
and of the Carnegie Institution. 

XXIII. HOW TO THINK 

Edward Everett Hale, LL.D., 

Chaplain of the United State^ Senate. 

XXIV. THE GIRL 

The Thing To Do 
Whitelaw Reid, LL.D., 

Chancellor of the University of the State of New 
York; Ambassador to England. 

XXV. MANHOOD 

Selection of One's Life-Work 

E. Benjamin Andrews, LL.D., 

President of the University of Nebraska. 

XXVI. THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 
• The College Man in Business 
Charles F. Thwing, LL.D., ■ 

President of Western Reserve University. 

[5] 



CONSENTS 



)^ 



Lecture 
XXVII. SPORT 

The Mission of Sport and Outdoor Life 
Grover Cleveland, LL.D., 

Ex-President of the United States. 

XXVIII. THE TOILERS 

Labor Organizations in America 
Carroll D. Wright, LL.D., 

President of Clark College; former Labor Com- 
missioner of the United States. 

XXIX. THE SOIL 

Land and Its Ownership in the Past 

Alfred R. Wallace, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., 

President of the Land Naturalization Society. 

XXX. ANARCHISM 

Thou Shalt Not Kill 
Count Leo Tolstoi. 

XXXI. WAR 

A Demonstration oj Its Futility 
David Starr Jordan, LL.D., 

President of Leland Stanford University; 

Carl Schurz, LL.D., 

Former United States Senator. 

XXXII. ARBITRATION 

A League of Peace 
Andrew Carnegie, LL.D., 

Lord Rector St. Andrews University. 

XXXIII. HISTORY 

Value oj History in the Formation oj Character 
Caroline Hazard, M.A., Litt.D., 
President of Wellesley College. 

XXXIV. THE POWER OF RELIGION 

Religion Still the Key to History 
Simeon Eben Baldwin, LL.D., 

Former President American Historical Associa- 
tion, Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale 
University. 

[6] 



CONTENTS 

Lecture 

XXXV. CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

Social Culture in Education and Religion 
William T. Harris, LL.D., 

Former United States Commissioner of Education. 

XXXVI. THE MYSTERIES 

What Has Psychic Research Accomplished? 
William F. Barrett, F.R.S., J.P., 

Royal College, Dublin; former President of the 
Society for Psychical Research. 

XXXVII. HYPNOTISM 

Its History, Nature, and Use 
Harold M. Hays, M.D., 
Mount Sinai Hospital. 

XXXVIII. THE WILL 

Its Cultivation and Power 
Jules Finot, LL.D., 
Editor of the Revue. 

XXXIX. OUR HOPE 

The Unknown God 

Sir Henry Thompson, M.D. 

XL. OUR GOAL 

The Making 0} a National Spirit 
Edwin A. Alderman. LL.D., 

President of the University of Virginia. 

Education and Democracy 

George Harris, LL.D., 

President of Amherst College. 



[7] 




FOREWORD 




Tyf/^HEN, as sometimes happens, a tattered manuscript oj 
mediceval times is resurrected from amid forgotten rub- 
bish heaps, scholars hesitate and argue as to the century of its 
production. Accidental outward marks may guide them ; but 
as to the thought, the outlook, the opinions, there is little to dis- 
criminate one century from the next, or the next. Mankind did 
march onward, it is true, but with such slow step that they seemed 
often to he merely marking time without advance. The unsolved 
problems of one generation were still disputed by their children's 

children. 

Now, however, we move at railroad speed. The problems 
of to-day are not those of two decades ago ; and at such acceler- 
ating rate do we rush onward that soon a year may see changes 
such as once engrossed a century. Nay, so swiftly are we swept 
face to face with new issues that the dead past at times forgets 
to bury its dead. There are elderly gentlemen among us, held 
by a comfortable income in some eddy of the current, who still 
maintain that the only vital issue of to-day is England's attitude 
towards us in the Civil War or the fact that Japan began her 
modern career under our tutelage in 1834. 

To these pleasantly reminiscent gentlemen, charming after- 
dinner speakers, interesting relics of an extinct age, the present 
series of addresses can possess little interest, except for its ''new- 
ness," the radical spirit of its thought. But to more active brains, 
to the men who, in office, in factory, or in field, are "making the 
nation'' of to-day, it must have an obvious value. Each one 
I [I] 



FO^WORD 

oj us is so busy in his own life that he cannot keep abreast of the 
lives of others. A well- known literary man, a twenty years^ 
graduate of my college, wrote me the other day for a copy of the 
college register. By mistake a clerk forwarded him instead a 
pamphlet containing the requisites for admission to the freshman 
class, whereon my literary friend wrote back to me, only half 
in jest, that despite my vigorous hint he must abandon any idea 
of re4aking his college course, as he could not possibly pass the 
entrance examinations. 

The schools of to-day do not teach what was taught twenty 
years ago. Our colleges are wholly different institutions. The 
man who closed his scholastic education in the " eight ies,^^ per- 
haps even in the "nineties,''^ and went out into life, his brain 
awhirl with certain problems which he and his generation must 
some day solve perforce, that man is surprised now by stumbling, 
in his newspaper, on some casual reference to his special diffi- 
culty as a thing done with, dismissed, and half forgotten. He 
realizes for a moment that the age has somehow swept along with- 
out him, that progress has passed him by. Then, being a busy 
man, he turns again to his own personal problem, with perhaps 
only a half-formed wish that he had kept more nearly abreast 
of the times, a half -formed resolve that ''some day'' he will "read 
up'' again. 

To that man, and to every one among us who seeks to main- 
tain the fulness of his heritage as " heir to all the ages, " is offered 
the present series of addresses. They give the most recent thought 
on each vital issue of the moment. They are written by men and 
women, the foremost leaders of the battle. Each name is a guaran- 
tee not only that the address is notable and worth the reading, 
but also that it is broadly thoughtful and deeply true. These 
are no hurried, superficial views, held to-day to be dismissed 
to-morrow ; they are the meditated opinions of the greatest 

I [2] 



FOREWORD 

specialists. Each address is worth incorporating into the 
reader's permanent body of thought, his outlook upon life. 

Several of the series have already received the stamp of public 
approval. They have been delivered as recent speeches, some 
before vast audiences of the people, others before learned societies, 
small bodies of the selected few. Surely, under such circum- 
stances if ever, under the criticism and approval of his fellow men, 
restrained from exaggeration by the sceptic's smile, stimulated 
to passion and power by the applause of all whose voiceless 
thoughts he has nobly interpreted in speech, then if ever does a 
speaker rise above his hearers, above himself, and become '^in- 
spired." Essays of inspiration these, and needful indeed was 
it that their earnest words should not perish on the breeze that 
caught them, but should be here preserved in print and given 
permanent weight — heralded to a wider audience. Others of the 
series have been written specially for this occasion. Others again 
have appeared in some temporary printed shape, and are now 
given permanent form. These, wherever necessary, have been 
revised by the author, or under his supervision, for the present 
purpose. 

For there is a purpose, an ''increasing purpose," which 
runs through them all. They are liot a hap- hazard collection 
of famous speeches, chance thrown together. Their themes have 
been laboriously selected, their sequence studied, their expression 
placed in the hands of those best fitted for the task. Thus, though 
each author speaks upon a different subject, there is a carefully 
outlined harmony runs through the whole. Here is, in brief, 
not many books, but one book. Each address does but face an- 
other aspect of the same great riddle and gives a strong man's 
reading of its secret. Taken as a whole, the series may be found 
to answer better than any one volume could, better than any one 
man could, the question that faces each among us, the question 

I [3] 



FOimVORD 

suggested by the title as to the meaning, the cause, and the issue 
of the life we live. 

A special introduction for this opening number of the series 
seems scarcely needful. Seth Low is so widely known for his 
long and honorable career, as President of Columbia University 
during its period of widest development, as Mayor of New York 
in days of peculiar stress and strain, as one of the foremost citizens 
of our land in every moment of need, that his voice must every- 
where receive attention, his views command respect. This 
address, delivered by him before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of 
Harvard, was published in the Atlantic Monthly and is here 
reproduced by the kind permission of the publishers, after being 
revised under Mr. Low^s supervision for its present use. It 
looks, as its title page suggests, over the general field of life, and 
indicates briefly the general character of some of the problems 
which the ensuing addresses must view at closer range. 

Perhaps he who will go step by step with our authors through 
each one's thought may before closing with the last find himself 
strengthened to give his o%un answer to the riddle. He may 
take a new attitude more confident, more self-assured towards 

life itself. 

C. F. H. 




[4] 



THE OUTLOOK 

" THE TREND OF THE CENTURY" 

BY 

SETH LOW 

FOBMEB PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




I VERY century has its own characteristics. 
The two influences which made the nine- 
teenth century what it was seem to me to 
be the scientific spirit and the democratic 
spirit. Thus, the nineteenth century, sin-" 
gularly enough, was the great interpreta- 
tive century both of nature and of the 
past, and at the same time the century of 
incessant and uprooting change in all that 
relates to the current life of men. It was 
also the century of national systems of 
popular education, and at the same time 
of nation-great armies; the century that did more than any 
other to scatter men over the face of the earth, and to con- 
centrate them in cities; the century of a universal suffrage that 
is based upon a belief in the inherent value of the individual; 
and the century of the corporation and the labor union, which 
in the dominion of capital and of labor threaten to obHterate 
the individual. I want to trace, if I can, what has been the 
trend of this remarkable century in the domain of thought, 
of society, of commerce, of industry, and of politics. Espe- 
cially I want to do this as it concerns life in the United States. 

I speak first of the trend of thought; for thought, imma- 
terial though it be, is the matrix that shapes the issues of hfe. 
The mind has been active in all fields during this fruitful cen- 
tury; but, outside of pohtics, it is to science that we must look 

I [5] 



THE (^TLOOK 

for the thoughts that have shaped all other thinking. When 
Von Helmholtz was in this country, a few years ago, he said that 
modern science was born when men ceased to summon nature 
to the support of theories already formed, and instead began 
to question nature for her facts, in order that they might thus 
discover the laws which these facts reveal. I do not know 
that it would be easy to sum up the scientific method, as the 
phrase runs, in simpler words. 

It would not be correct to say that this process was un- 
known before the past century; for there have been individual 
observers and students of nature in all ages. The seed idea 
is to be found at least as far back as the time of Bacon, not to 
say of Aristotle. But it is true that only within the last cen- 
tury has this attitude towards nature become the uniform attitude 
of men of science. The results that have flowed from this gen- 
eral attitude towards nature have been so wonderful that the 
same method has been employed by students of other subjects, 
with results hardly less noteworthy. To this attitude towards na- 
ture on the part of men of science we owe the great advances in 
our knowledge of natural law which the century has witnessed ; 
and from this increased knowledge of natural law the mani- 
fold inventions have come that have changed the face of the 
world. To the scientific method applied to the problems of 
the past by men of letters, we owe our ability to understand the 
hieroglyphs of Egypt and the cuneiform inscriptions of Baby- 
lonia. 

One of the chief results of the scientific method as applied 
to nature and the study of the past is the change that it has 
wrought in the philosophic conception of nature and of human 
society. By the middle of the century, Darwin had given 
what has been held to be substantial proof of the theory of 
the development of higher forms out of lower in all Hving things ; 
and since then the doctrine of evolution, not as a body of exact 
teaching, but as a working theory, has obtained a mastery 
over the minds of men which has dominated all their studies 
and all their thinking. The consequences of the doctrine 
have been very different in different fields of mental activity. 
In the field of rehgious thought it has undoubtedly been a 

I [6] 



THE OUTLOOK 

source of very serious perplexity, because it has confronted 
men with the necessity of reshaping their conceptions of the 
divine method of creation according to a theory exactly the 
opposite of that which had been previously held. When 
Copernicus, in the sixteenth century, began to teach that the 
earth revolved about the sun, it must have seemed to be doc- 
trine that disputed the most evident of facts. All men in all 
ages had seen the sun rise in the east and set in the west, and 
therefore the new doctrine must have appeared, at first sight, 
to be utterly subversive both of the science of that day and of 
the religion of that day. The men of science, then as now, 
easily accommodated themselves to the new teaching as its 
truthfulness became clear, despite its revolutionary character; 
for to them it meant only a fresh start along a more promising 
road. But the opposition of the Church reveals the agony of 
mind that was involved for the Christian beUever in the effort 
to restate his conception of man's importance in the sight of 
God, from the point of view of the newly recognized truth 
instead of from the point of view of the old error. Still, men 
were able to do this, though it took them a long time to do it. 
The discovery of Copernicus was announced in 1543; yet I 
read the other day, in the life of Samuel Johnson, the first 
president of King's College in New York city, that it was by 
him and his colleagues of Yale, in the early part of the eigh- 
teenth century, that even the learned people of Connecticut 
were led to accept the Copernican theory of the universe in- 
stead of the Ptolemaic. Indeed, so late as the first Commence- 
ment of King's College, in 1758, one of the students, ''in a clear 
and concise manner, demonstrated the revolution of the earth 
round the sun, both from astronomical observations and the 
theory of gravity, and defended the thesis against two of his 
classmates." These incidents illustrate happily how far 
America was from Europe in those days. It is easy to believe, 
therefore, that the evolutionary conception of creation, with 
its sublime suggestion of the limitless possibihties of endless 
development, will in time be accepted as the basis of men's 
religious thinking as universally as religious men now accept 
the Copernican system of the universe. In the mean while, 

I [7] 



THE (^TLOOK 

it should be a source of comfort, to every man whose mind has 
been troubled by this new teaching of science that, in this 
experience, nothing has happened to him which has not hap- 
pened before; and it may be observed that if the man of science 
has thus taught, in a new way, that man is alHed to the beasts 
that perish, he has also shown, by his own wide reading of 
natural law, that man is capable of tracing the processes of 
the infinite, thus setting the seal of science to the doctrine 
of revelation, that man, in his essence, is the child of God. 

The effect of the scientific method and of the doctrine of 
evolution upon philosophy, during the century, has been to 
bring the philosopher and the man of science closer together. 
In ancient times, the philosopher was in his own person a man 
of science; that is to say, he not only knew all of the science 
that was known, but he was himself the principal agent in 
advancing man's scientific knowledge. Through the cen- 
turies, as man's knowledge of nature has increased, one science 
after another has been set aside from the domain of philosophy, 
so to speak, as a field apart. Thus, astronomy, physics, and 
chemistry have long been recognized as independent fields of 
knowledge; and the philosopher has left it to the astronomer, 
the physicist, and the chemist to enlarge man's knowledge in 
those fields. During the nineteenth century, even psychology 
has become, to a great extent, an experimental science, so that 
philosophy, in our day, has come to concern itself once more 
with all knowledge rather than with special fields of knowl- 
edge. Accordingly we find the greatest philosophers basing 
their philosophies upon the widest possible survey of facts; 
and the greatest scientists turning from their facts to account for 
them, as they may, by some adequate philosophy. Thus, the 
theory of evolution, resting as it does upon the observed facts 
of nature, has come to dominate the philosophy of the century 
no less than its science. 

In the domain of education one sees the same philosophy 
at work, having for its handmaid the democratic tendency 
which has marked the political development of the century. 
Every public educational system of our day, broadly speaking, 
is the child of the nineteenth century. The educational system 
I [8] 



THE OUTLOOK 

of Germany, which in its results has been of hardly less value 
to mankind than to Germany itself, dates from the reconstitu- 
tion of the German universities after the battle of Jena. What- 
ever system France may have had before the Revolution went 
down in the cataclysm that destroyed the ancient regime, so 
that the educational system of France also dates from the Napo- 
leonic period. In the United States, while the seeds of the 
public school system may have been planted in the eighteenth, 
or perhaps even in the seventeenth century, it has only been in 
the nineteenth century, with the development of the country, 
that our public school system has grown into what we now see; 
while in England, the system of national education, in a demo- 
cratic sense, must be dated from 1870. This attempt on the 
part of the great nations to provide systematic instruction for 
the people, from childhood to manhood, from the elementary 
school to the university, reflects, as it seems to me, the com- 
mingling of the two great tendencies of the century, the demo- 
cratic and the evolutionary. Out of the growth of the demo- 
cratic principle has come the belief that it is worth while to 
educate all the children of the state; and out of the scientific 
method, which has led to the general acceptance of the evo- 
lutionary theory, has been developed the advance in educational 
method which is so marked a feature of the last decades of 
the century. Formerly, it was satisfactory to educate a child 
according to some preconceived theory, or as it had always 
been done. To-day, the best systems of education are increas- 
ingly based upon the laboratory method, and upon the obser- 
vation of facts relating to childhood and youth. The new 
disciplines, also, are freely admitted on even terms with 
the old. 

In other domains of knowledge, such as history and litera- 
ture, the application of the scientific method has resulted not 
only in the overthrow of many of our preconceived conceptions 
in regard to the past, but also in the opening up of vast fields 
of information which formerly were closed to the seeker after 
truth, because he did not command the open sesame to their 
treasures. I think, therefore, the statement is justified which 
I made at the beginning of this address, that it is to science 

I [9] 



THE OUTLOOK 

we must look for the thoughts which, in the nineteenth century, 
dominated and fructified all other thinking. The illumination 
of the century proceeded from that source, and the light that 
has been shed, especially by the study of nature, has been 
carried into every nook and corner of human history and human 
life. 

But the consequences of the general scientific attitude tow- 
ards nature which was characteristic of the century have been 
twofold. Not only has the scientific method furnished a phi- 
losophy of nature and of human life, but, by the great increase 
in man's knowledge of natural law to which it has led, it has 
resulted in endless inventions, and these, in turn, have changed 
the face of the world. It is not my purpose to catalogue these 
inventions, — not even the most conspicuous of them. I rather 
wish to point out some of the changes in the life of society which 
have been caused by them. One of the most noticeable of 
these results is the great increase in the number and size of 
cities. What the elevator is to the high building the railroad 
and steamboat are to the city. They make practicable a city 
such as without them could not be. In striking contrast with 
this tendency of people to concentrate in cities, we observe, 
on the other hand, a world-movement of people which has been 
facilitated by the same inventions. Man's knowledge of the 
earth that he inhabits has been made substantially complete, 
and the ends of the earth and the islands of the sea have been 
brought into rapid and easy communication with the centres 
of the world's life. In other ages, tribes often migrated from 
one part of the world to another. The path by which they 
went was stained with blood, and the country of which they 
took possession they made their own by violence and conquest. 
But in the past century millions of people, not as tribes, but as 
families and as individuals, migrated peacefully from Europe to 
America, to Australia, to Asia, and to Africa. This world-wide 
movement of the peoples has been made possible only by the 
inventions that have, on the other hand, built up the cities; 
but it reflects, also, as it seems to me, the influence of the 
democratic spirit urging men, in vast numbers and upon 
their own responsibility, always to seek for conditions of life 
I [lo] 



THE OUTLOOK 

in which they may enter upon life's struggle less handicapped 

by the past. 

The rapid march of invention during the century has been 
coincident with one far-reaching and progressive change in 
the habits of society, the importance of which is seldom recog- 
nized. I refer to deposit banking. Of all the agencies that 
affected the world in the nineteenth century, I am sometimes 
inchned to think that this is one of the most influential. 
If deposit banking may not be said to be one fruit of democracy, 
it certainly may be said that it is in those countries in which 
democracy is most dominant that deposit banking thrives best. 
One of the first banks in the United States was the Bank of 
Maryland, opened in Baltimore in 1790. It was opened for 
a year before it had a depositor. Even fifty years ago the 
discussions of bankers turned mainly upon circulation. Com- 
paratively little attention was given to the question of deposits. 
At the present time our banks are comparatively indifferent to 
circulation; but they aim to secure as large deposits as possible. 
Deposit banking does for the funds of a country precisely what 
mobilization does for the army of a country like France. Mo- 
bilization there places the entire manhood of the country in 
readiness for war. Deposit banking keeps every dollar of the 
country on a war-footing all the time. Some one has said that 
it would have been of no use to have invented the railroad at an 
earlier period of the world's history, for there would not have 
been enough money at command to make the invention avail- 
able before this modern banking system had made its appear- 
ance. If this be so, then indeed the part that was played by 
deposit banking in the developments of the century cannot be 
overestimated. 

During the century the conditions of the world's commerce 
radically altered. It is not simply that the steamboat and the 
locomotive have taken the place of the sailing-ship and the 
horse; that the submarine cable has supplanted the mails; 
nor even that these agencies have led to such improvements 
in banking facilities that foreign commerce is done, for the 
most part, for hardly more than a brokerage upon the trans- 
action. These are merely accidents of the situation. The 

I [II] 



THE (^TLOOK 

fundamental factors have been the opening up of virgin soil 
in vast areas to the cultivation of man, and the discovery of 
how to create artificial cold, which makes it possible to trans- 
port for long distances produce that only a few years ago was 
classed as perishable. The net result of these influences has 
been to produce a world-competition at every point of the globe, 
both on a scale never before known, and as regards articles 
that have been heretofore exempt from all competition except 
neighborhood competition. Thus, not only has it become 
impossible to raise wheat profitably in England, or even on our 
own Atlantic coast, but the price of such an article as butter, 
for example, is fixed in the State of New York by what it costs 
to produce a similar grade of butter in Austraha. Under the in- 
fluence of these changes, the merchant of the early part of the 
nineteenth century has become "as extinct as the mastodon." 

But if these changes have introduced new and strange 
problems for the merchant, they have also presented to the 
statesman problems of no less difficulty. In the first half of 
the century, China was the great source of supply for both tea 
and silk. At the present time more than half of the tea con- 
sumed in England comes from India and Ceylon, and more 
than three-quarters of the tea consumed in the United States 
comes from the island of Formosa and from Japan. Even in 
silk China has largely lost her market to Japan and Europe. 
Who shall say that this gradual destruction of China's export 
trade has not had much to do with bringing the ancient empire 
to the point where it seems about to be broken up ? The out- 
flow from the old empire is not sufficient to stem the inflow; 
and the aggressive commerce of the outside world appears to 
be ready to break down the ancient barriers and overflow the 
country, whether it will or no. 

This unification of the world, and its reduction in size from 
the point of view of commerce, reveal some tendencies that are 
full of interest. The general tendency to protection was the 
first answer of the statesman and of the nations to the pressure 
of competition from new quarters. It represented an effort 
to make the terms of the world competition between young 
countries and old, between old countries and new, somewhat 

I [12] 



THE OUTLOOK 

more even. The remarkable exception to this tendency pre- 
sented by Great Britain reflects the exceptional situation of 
Great Britain among the nations. Her home domain is too 
small to furnish occupation for either her men or her money, 
and therefore the people of the little island have swarmed all 
over the world. As a consequence, Great Britain's commercial 
policy, is in a sense, a world-policy; but it is noticeable that the 
other great nations, whether young or old, being obliged to 
frame their policy from a different point of view, have hitherto 
relied, with few if any exceptions, upon protection to equalize 
the terms of the competition. Now, however, a second ten- 
dency appears to be discernible. If protection represents the 
attempt of a nation to hold itself aloof, to some extent, from 
the competition of the world, the tendency of the aggressive 
nations of Europe to divide up among themselves the unde- 
veloped portions of the earth, and even the territory of weaker 
nations, seems to me to represent a growing conviction that the 
policy of protection, from its nature, must be a temporary one, 
and also to reveal a dimly recognized belief that the true way 
for the old countries to contend with the semicivilized, in the 
long run, is to raise the standard of living in the less advanced 
countries, so that the semicivilized shall not be able to drag 
the most highly developed peoples down to their own level. 
That is to say, if the first response of the civihzed nations to 
the world competition to which I have referred has been the 
attempt to limit its unwelcome effects by the erection of artificial 
barriers at every custom-house, the second response seems 
likely to come in the effort of the strong nations to dominate 
the weak, — not for their destruction, but for their uplifting. 
In other words, civilization, being brought face to face with the 
competition of the uncivilized, appears to believe that the 
best way to preserve its own integrity is to introduce the con- 
ditions of civilization ever^-where. If this be a correct diag- 
nosis of the recent developments of foreign policy on the part 
of several' of the great nations, it indicates a disposition to 
secure protection in the future by aggressive rather than by 
defensive action as heretofore. I am not discussing the merits 
of the case, but only trying to point out the possible significance 

I [13] 



THE ^TLOOK 

of movements that are likely to have no httlc influence on the 
future. 

But v^e should lose sight of one of the most important fac- 
tors that have been at v^ork in producing these results, and 
in changing the life of men, if we did not consider for a moment 
the influence of invention in the great domain of industry. 
In its relation to agriculture this influence appears in three 
forms: there has been a much more intelligent apphcation of 
chemistry to the cultivation of the soil; steam-power has been 
very largely substituted for hand-power; and the railroad has 
made accessible vast areas of country which, in any previous 
age of the world, it would have been impossible to cultivate 
profitably. In the substitution of machinery for hand-power 
in the domain of manufacture, two incidental results have 
proved of far-reaching importance, although neither was neces- 
sarily involved in the substitution of the machine for the hand. 
I refer, first, to the division of labor, and second, to the inter- 
changeability of parts in many standard manufactured articles. 
It has added enormously to the productiveness of a factory 
to divide the labor employed according to the processes. By 
this means the labor becomes more expert, the product is in- 
creased, and the quality is improved. It is true that the action 
of the laborer thereby becomes also, to a great extent, auto- 
matic; but so does the execution of the skilled musician, as 
the result of his practice and his skill. Does this automatic 
character of the occupation tend to the belittling or the enlarge- 
ment of the minds of the working-men? It is probable that 
the mind of a laborer, thus largely set free during his hours of 
toil, is at work quite as busily as before, and in ways that make 
him more than ever an active factor in the world's life. The 
practice of making interchangeable parts in many manufactured 
articles has also added greatly to the convenience and avail- 
abihty of such articles. The standardizing of the threads of 
screws, the sizes of bolts, and the like, adds beyond measure 
to the effectiveness of manufacture and to the convenience of 
industry. But it is a superficial view of these things to sup- 
pose that their effect is exhausted in a tendency to cheapen 
products and to improve industrial opportunity. It is evident 

I ^ [14] 



THE OUTLOOK 

that division of labor is permanently possible under freedom 
only in communities the members of which are animated by 
mutual trustfulness and mutual respect. Interchangeable parts 
are of value only when men trade continually with one another. 
They involve a recognition of the advantage to be had by con- 
sidering the general welfare rather than simply one's own con- 
venience. That is to say, both of these things reveal and em- 
phasize the tendency to democracy in industry, which seems 
to me as marked a feature of our times as the tendency to de- 
mocracy in the poHtical Hfe of men. In other words, industry 
rests more and more completely upon the mutual interdepen- 
dence of the masses of mankind. 

Other changes, less material, took place in the commercial 
and industrial world during this same great century. The 
wage system became universal, and the corporation and the 
trade union became dominant in many branches of industry 
and commerce. Commodore Vanderbilt laid the foundation 
of his fortune by operating a small boat on a ferry. The busi- 
ness of transportation grew under his hands to such an extent 
that even so exceptionally able a man as he could not control 
it in his own person. Under the form of a corporation, he was 
obliged to associate with himself many others, in order to carry 
on the immense business which he developed. The corpora- 
tion in this aspect, therefore, is democratic, resting as it does 
upon the substitution of the ownership of many for the owner- 
ship of one. It may, indeed, be said that the corporation is 
ohgarchic rather than democratic; but the oligarchic tendency 
in society made corporations even for general business pur- 
poses that rested upon exclusive privilege. The corporations 
of our day seem to me democratic, except as they control ex- 
clusive public franchises, in that they are open to all, and must 
compete with all. A sailing-ship used to cost comparatively 
little, and many an individual could afford to have one or two 
or a small fleet of them. The modern steamship, on the other 
hand, is exceedingly costly; and there would be few of them 
indeed if there were no more than could be owned by individ- 
uals. But just as in poHtical democracy there is a tendency 
on the part of the many bhndly to follow one, so in corporations 

I [15 ] 



THE ^TLOOK 

one man is apt to determine the efficiency or inefficiency of the 
corporation. Similarly, in the trade union and other organ- 
izations of labor, the organizations which are most capably led 
are the most effective. 

The corporation and the trade union interest me especially 
from another point of view, because of the strange contrast 
they present to the democratic tendencies of the times. De- 
mocracy, as a political theory, emphasizes the equahty of men 
and the equal rights and privileges of all men before 
the law. The tendency of it has been, in this country, 
to develop in multitudes of men great individuahty and self- 
reliance. Side by side with this tendency, however, we see 
the corporation supplanting the individual capitalist, and the 
trade union obliterating the individual laborer, as direct agents 
in the work of the world. Strange as this contrast is, both 
tendencies must be consistent with democracy, for the corpora- 
tion and the trade union flourish most where democracy is 
most developed. Indeed, they seem to be successful and 
powerful just because democracy pours into them both its vital 
strength. The criticisms that are justly enough launched 
against both probably spring largely from the fact that, by 
reason of the rapidity of their development, men have not yet 
learned how to control them so as to secure the maximum of 
benefit and the minimum of abuse. 

In this country, I suppose, there are few who would deny 
that the corporate form of doing business is not only inevitable 
but on the whole advantageous. At the same time, the opinion 
undoubtedly would be almost as universal that the abuses in 
corporate management confront the country with some of the 
most serious problems that lie before it. The impersonality 
of the corporation lends itself readily to many abuses from which 
the sense of personal responsibility saves individual men. The 
corporation, being a creature of legislation, as it has gradually 
acquired control of more and more of the field of business, 
has brought all business into relation with the legislator, which 
is as unfortunate as possible. When business was in private 
control, legislators interfered comparatively little, because those 
who conducted the business had votes. Corporations, how- 

I [i6] 



THE OUTLOOK 

ever, have no votes, but they have money; and it is not exag- 
geration to say that the people fear, if they do not beheve, that 
the money of the corporations is often more mfluential m shapmg 
lecrislation than are the votes of the people. The statement of 
a milroad magnate, that in Repubhcan counties he was a 
Republican, and in Democratic counties he was a Democrat 
but that everywhere he was for the railroad was the cynical 
admission of an attitude easily understood but none the ess 
dangerous. When one tries to devise remedies for the evident 
dangers of the situation, it is not easy to be precise It is pos- 
sible I think, to indicate some directions in which to look for 
improvement, so far as improvement is possible outside of higher 
standards of pubHc virtue. The f-f-f ^1/;;; '^J^, 
corporate form of management, undoubtedly, is the oss of 
personal responsibility. It is a common remark that as 
directors men will do things which as individuals they would ^ 
not think of doing. Indeed, the evil Hes deeper than this. 
Because they are directors, and therefore as theyjay /ru^^^^^ 
for others they feel constrained to do for the benefit of the 
^ockholde'rs what as individuals they abhor._ This reasoning 
may well be considered fallacious, but that it is very influential 
in determining the action of corporate directors cannot be 
questioned. The remedy for this loss of personal responsi- 
bility, so far as there is any remedy by legislation, must come 
from pubhcity. When the legislature grants the impersonal 
form for the conduct of business, and grants, m addition, a 
limited hability, there is no reason why it should not at the same 
time, demand that all of the operations of this artificial person 
-or perhaps I ought to say, of this combination of natural and 
privileged persons-should be matters of public record. Theo- 
retically I cannot beheve that there is any reason why the de- 
mand for pubhcity in relation to the actions of corporations 
should not be carried to any detail to which it may be necessary 
to carry it in order to secure the result of absolute honesty as 
towards stockholders, creditors, and the public. It should be 
observed, perhaps, that corporations naturally divide them- 
selves into two classes,-those which exercise, by virtue ot a 
pubhc franchise, quasi- governmental functions, and those 

[17] 



THE ^TLOOK 

which conduct purely private business. I think the same rule 
of pubhcity, as a general principle, should apply to both kinds 
of corporations; but it is evident that publicity may have to be 
carried much farther in regard to the first kind than in regard 
to the second. 

I think there is one other direction in which corporations 
can be further controlled to the public advantage. In many of 
the States, already, it is impossible to organize a corporation 
without paying in the capital in cash. If this re(iuirement 
could be extended so as to demand that neither stock nor bonds 
should be issued except for a cash equivalent, it would strike 
at the root of one of the evils incident to corporate management 
which has done much to arouse against corporations popular 
indignation. I do not know why the law might not require, 
where stocks or bonds are to be issued as the equivalent of 
invested property, patents, good-will, and the Hke, that the 
valuation upon which such issues may be made should be fixed 
by pubhc authority. The corporation that means to serve the 
public honestly and fairly is not hkcly to object to being required 
to have, assets of full value for all the securities which it offers 
to the public. It is the corporation which wishes to make 
money out of the pubhc dishonestly that aims to float all manner 
of securities that have no value at all, or only a nominal value. 
I believe it to be a righteous demand that the laws regulating 
corporations should protect the public much more adequately 
than they do now against such frauds. 

But while it is evident that the corporate form of conducting 
business has been of wide benefit to mankind, despite the abuses 
that have attached to it, there may not be such general admission 
of the truth that the trade union and the labor organizations 
have been equally beneficial. It is sometimes said that labor 
organizes because capital does, and that it is obliged to do so in 
self-defence. I am far from saying that there is no truth in 
this statement, but I think that it is only a partial statement of 
the truth. Labor organizes, primarily, not simply to contend 
against capital and for self-defence, but for precisely the same 
reason that capital docs; that is, for its own advantage. It 
organizes in response to a tendency of the times which labor 



THE OUTLOOK 

can resist no more than capital. It is the recognition by labor 
of the vision of the poet, that "the individual withers, and the 
world is more and more." It may not be denied that organized 
labor has often been cruel in its attitude to laboring-men who 
wish to work upon an individual basis; but it cannot be justly 
said that it is more cruel than organized capital has been in its 
own field. The individual competitor has been removed from 
the pathway of the trust as remorselessly as the individual 
laborer has been deprived of work by the labor organization. 
Indeed, I think it may be said that there is no fault that can be 
charged against organized labor which may not be charged with 
equal truth against organized capital. The forms in which 
these faults exhibit themselves, from the nature of the case, 
are different ; but in both instances the faults are the same. In 
the mean while, one has only to consider the protectionist 
policy of nations, in order to be able to understand the pro- 
tectionist policy of the trade unions. No laboring-man can 
tell at what moment a new invention will appear which will 
deprive him of his livelihood. It is inevitable, at such a time, 
that men should draw together, and present a common front 
to the problems of life, rather than attempt to contend with 
them as individual atoms. It is evident, also, that in many 
directions the trade union has improved the condition of the 
laboring-man, looked at from the point of view of the mass. It 
seems to me that the true line of development, instead of an- 
tagonizing the organization of labor, is to endeavor to make it 
responsible, so as to substitute for the irresponsibility of the 
single laborer the adequate responsibility of the great body of 
laborers. I have been told that in the most progressive labor 
unions of England, where the question is an older one than it 
is here, the aim of the union is to determine by joint action 
and by agreement with the employers the conditions under 
which the trade shall be carried on, while the tendency is to be 
indifferent whether the person employed is in the union or out 
of the union, provided that the standard regulations thus estab- 
lished for the trade are observed upon both sides. Under 
such a policy the war of the union is waged against inequitable 
conditions of life, and not against individual laborers who 

I [19] 



THE ^TLOOK 

happen to be outside of the union. It is easy to understand 
that the employer would prefer to have all such matters entirely 
under his own control; but it is probably true that, under the 
complex conditions of modern life, this is no longer absolutely 
possible anywhere; and it is also probably true that, by a general 
recognition of this circumstance, the standard of living may be 
raised in any community, to the great benefit of all concerned. 

The tendency to democracy in politics was unquestionably 
the dominant poHtical fact of the century. Not to attempt to 
trace the operation of this tendency everywhere, it seemed to 
show itself not only in the wide extension of the suffrage in 
such countries as England and the United States, but also in 
the nation-wide army of Germany. It is true that there is 
little enough of the free spirit of democracy in a military system 
like that of Germany. On the other hand, the universal 
suffrage existing in Germany for the election of members of 
the Reichstag, and the universal demand of the state for mili- 
tary service from all its people, are both of them instances of 
the use of the democratic spirit of the times in the service of a 
different polity. In other words, outside of Russia, and 
possibly even there, monarchical government in Europe is obliged 
to depend for its support upon the great body of the nation, 
instead of upon the power of the great and the noble. In Eng- 
land the monarchy, although it retains the forms and expressions 
of power that were natural in the time of the Tudors, has be- 
come so responsive to the demands of the democracy as to give, 
in effect, a democratic government. In the United States the 
century, though it began with a limited suffrage, ends with 
universal manhood suffrage, and even with woman suffrage 
in some of the Western States. There is one essential differ- 
ence, however, which ought never to be forgotten, between 
the democracy of the United States and the democracy of 
England. The struggle of democracy in England for cen- 
turies has been to convert a government of privilege into a 
modern democracy. This imphes an hereditary disposition on 
the part of the great body of the people to look up to men of 
education and position as natural leaders — a tendency which 
still remains to temper very importantly all the activities of 

I [20] 



THE OUTLOOK 

English public life. In the United States there is no such 
tendency. Hence the problem of democracy here is to learn 
how to educate itself to higher standards, and therefore to the 
attainment of better results. In other words, democracy in the 
United States is building on hard-pan, and every advance 
gained is an advance that raises the education of the whole 
people up to a higher level. Undoubtedly, universal suffrage 
and the large immigration of people without any experience in 
self-government have given form to many of our problems; 
but I often think there is far too great a disposition among us 
to magnify the difficulties which these conditions present. If 
all our failures be admitted, whatever they are, the histoiy of 
the United States is certainly a marvellous one. Surely it is 
bad philosophy to assume that our history is what it is in despite 
of, and not because of, our democracy. It is a notable fact 
that hardly an immigrant who remains in this country long 
enough to become a citizen is willing to return to live in his 
own home. This is a striking testimony to the fact that, what- 
ever our shortcomings, the average conditions of life are freer 
and happier here than anywhere else in the world. And our 
institutions have certainly sufficed to produce people of the 
very highest average of intelligence. 

The fact is, in my judgment, that our problems arise not 
so much from universal suffrage as from the effect of the multi- 
plication table applied to all the problems of life. I recollect 
that Mr. James Bryce, when in this country a few years ago, 
delivered an interesting lecture which he entitled "An Age of 
Discontent." In the lecture he pointed out that during the 
early part of this century the great desire of men was for political 
liberty. But when poHtical hberty had been obtained, he said, 
instead of ushering in an epoch of universal good-will, it had 
brought with it apparently only universal discontent. Allowing 
the statement to pass unchallenged, I should be inclined to 
say, first of all, if I were to try to suggest an explanation of the 
prevailing discontent, that a partial explanation, at least, can 
be found in the immense increase of popular opportunity that 
is due to the spread of democracy, and which has resulted in 
so magnifying every problem that the world has not yet learned 

I [21] 



THE ^TLOOK 

how to deal with many of them. The problems are not only 
new; in scale they are thoroughly in keeping with the times, 
for nothing is more characteristic of the age than the large 
units of its enterprise. A single builchng to-day will hold as 
many tenants as a block of buildings in the beginning of the 
last century; a single bridge of our time will cost as much as 
twenty bridges of the earlier day ; and so one might go through 
the entire catalogue of private and public undertakings. But 
size often makes simple things difficult. Any one building a 
house in the country, when he has dug a well, has solved the 
problem of his water supply; but to supply water for a great 
city calls for the outlay of millions of dollars, and for the em- 
ployment of the best engineering talent in the land. Yet 
nothing has happened except that the problem has been magni- 
fied. Thus it is clear that the difficulties created by the multi- 
plication table are real; so that the very enlargement of oppor- 
tunity that democracy has brought with it has faced democracy 
with problems far harder than were formerly presented to any 
government. 

Another cause of the prcvaihng discontent, if that be taken 
for granted, I find in the constant and uprooting changes in 
life that have been incident to the rapid progress of scientific 
invention in our day, and from which no class of people have 
been exempt. The unrest is so general and so world-wide 
that it is not surprising that men are seeking to find for it some 
remedy which, by its thoroughness, seems to give promise of a 
complete cure. Every one is conscious of the new problems, 
but no one is wise enough to see how they are to be worked 
out. Men want a universal panacea. Accordingly, the an- 
archist and the nihilist say that all government, or even 
society itself, is a failure; that the thing to do is to de- 
stroy the foundations of government or of society as they 
now exist and to start fresh. The communist, less radical, 
says that society is not at fault, but that the institution of 
private property is the source of all trouble. If communism 
could be introduced, and the people could own everything in 
common, then, he thinks, the inequalities and injustices of hf e 
would disappear. The socialist, on the other hand, recognizing 
I [22] 



THE OUTLOOK 

the fallacy of both claims, says, No, that is /lot the trouble. 
The state, as the one pre-eminently democratic corporation of 
the day, 'ought to control the instruments of industry and 
commerce. When these are controlled by the state, for the 
general good, instead of being held as now for private advantage 
then a better day will be ushered in. And so it goes. It 
cannot be gainsaid that under every form of government the 
times are trying men's souls in every condition of hfe; but there 
is no universal panacea. There is nothing to be done but 
patiently to meet each problem as it comes, in the best way 
possible, in the confidence that in the long run the outcome 
will be advantageous to mankind. This, at all events, I thmk 
may be said of our own people and of their equipment for the 
problems of the times: that the American people, m great 
crises, by their self-control, by their willingness to make sacri- 
fices, and by their evident honesty of purpose, have gladdened 
the hearts of their friends, and have encouraged those who love 
to believe that mankind is worthy of trust. That our country 
has not perfectly learned the art of self-government goes with- 
out saying; but that it has made progress in many and difficult 
directions I think must also be admitted. 

In the mean while, some of the problems of greatest difficulty 
are those which come simply from our size. Merely to get out 
the vote of a great city, or of a State, or of the nation requires 
so much machinery as to give to the machine in pohtics a power 
that does not always make for the public good. It is not 
surprising, therefore, that wherever this problem is greatest, as 
in the large cities and the large States, there the tendency to 
the control of the machine by one man, and to the control of the 
government by one man through his control of the machine, 
is the most evident. It does not yet fully appear how the 
country is to secure the legitimate results now obtained through 
the party machines, without paying to the machines, as such, a 
price which is out of all proportion to the value of their services. 
It is not to be beheved, however, for one moment, that the 
wisdom and patriotism of the future will be any less equal_ to 
the solution of our problems than the wisdom and patriotism 
of the past have been. It is apparent that the power of the 
I [23] 



f 



> 



THE OUTLOOK 

machine, in the last statement, hcs in its control of the power 
to nominate, because the control of that power opens or closes 
for every man the door to public hfe. In some way, it must be 
made easier for men whose aim is simply to serve the public to 
get into public life and to stay in it without loss of self-respect. 
The many movements toward primary reform which look to 
regaining for the people the control of nominations are move- 
ments in the right direction. It is evident that the public 
instinct has recognized the source of the difficulty, and that 
everywhere men are at work trying to find a remedy for the 
evils of which they have become aware. The saying, " Eternal 
vigilance is the price of liberty," did not originate in our day. 
We are conscious of our own shortcomings and of our own 
difficulties, and we are apt to forget those out of which the world 
has grown. We have only to remember these things to gain 
heart. In a single word, I believe the problem of good govern- 
ment, in our day and country, is largely a problem of education ; 
and in this view it is interesting to recall what was pointed 
out not long ago by Dr. Stanley Hall, that education is the 
one thing as to the value of which all men everywhere, at the 
present time, are agreed. Not that there is agreement on the 
methods and detail of education; but all men are agreed that 
education is a thing to be encouraged, a thing to be desired, a 
thing to be struggled for, and a thing to profit by. In this 
education our universities have a large part to play. They are 
already doing much in the direction of a constructive study of 
politics and of society. Perhaps they are not doing enough in 
the direction of the constructive study of industry and com- 
merce, for in an industrial and commercial age both political 
and social questions are largely shaped by commerce and 
industry. In economics, the work of the universities is largely 
critical, not to say destructive; but because of their ability to 
illuminate the problems of the present with a broad knowledge 
of what is being done the world over, as well as with the knowl- 
edge of the past, and because of their own inherent democracy 
of spirit which puts them in vital touch with the spirit of the 
times, I am confident that they may, if they will, make valuable 
contributions to such a study of industry and commerce as will 

I [24] 



THE OUTLOOK 

cause the universities to become still more important factors 
in shaping the future of the country. 

To sum up, therefore, I should say that the trend of the past 
century has been to a great increase in knowledge, which has 
been found to be, as of old, the knowledge of good and evil; 
that this knowledge has become more and more the property 
of all men rather than of a few ; that as a result, the very increase 
of opportunity has led to the magnifying of the problems with 
which humanity is obliged to deal; and that we find ourselves, 
at the beginning of a new century, face to face with problems 
of world-wide importance and utmost difficulty, and with no 
new means of coping with them other than the patient education 
of the masses of men. However others may tremble as they 
contemplate the perplexities of the coming century, the children 
of the universities should find it easy to keep heart; for they 
know that higher things have been developed in pain and 
struggle out of lower since creation began; and in the atmos- 
phere of the university, with its equality of privilege and wealth 
of opportunity open to all, they must have learned, if they have 
learned anything of value, the essential nobility of the demo- 
cratic spirit that so surely holds the future in its hands — 
the spirit that seeks, with the strength of all, to serve all and 
uplift all. 



[25] 



II 



THE DANGER 

BY 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 



TF the general outlook for our people be fair, as Mr. Low has 
pointed out, nevertheless we face dangers in the future. 
Dangers obviously are of two classes. They are warning shadows 
which may extend either above an individual or above a race; and 
in this our search for the whole meaning of modern life we must 
examine the threat of the future in both these aspects. We take 
here and first its general warning for the race. Unfortunately it is 
just this broader danger that many of us are quite ready to ignore. 
We do not understand it; it seems to have no material threat for us, 
ourselves; and what is called the ^'social conscience'^ is not fully 
developed in us all. Many among us feel no vivid responsibility 
for our neighbor or for our children's children. " The nation will 
last my time" is a too common phrase wherewith a man turns back 
to his own narrow interests. Untrained in history, he does not 
know that when a racial danger strikes, it strikes with sudden rage. 
No magistrate expects it; a few ranting prophets proclaim it and 
are laughed at — as we are laughing at them to-day. Then comes 
the lightning bolt. Therefore it behooves even the most selfish of 
us, for his own sake, if he can find no broader standpoint, to take 
heed to the danger of the future, lest even he in his own narrow 
body be involved in the disaster. 

To these dangers that approach the nation no man is more 

fully alive than he whom we have set to be our chief. Again and 

again, in private speech and in public proclamation, has President 

Roosevelt cried out words of warning, perhaps never more posi- 

u [i] 



TH^)ANGER 

lively than in the address which is here incorporated in our scries 
with Jiis approval. It ivas delivered on Labor Day in ipoj, at the 
New York State Fair at Syracuse ; and Mr. Roosevelt weaves 
happily into his opening sentence the fact that he is addressing an 
audience of farmers and laborers. Later on he emphasizes that he 
sees also before him merchants and professional men, that, in 
short, his words are for the whole broad nation. They are worth 
our listening. 

Governor Higgins; my fellow-citizens: 

In speaking on Labor Day at the annual fair of the New 
York State Agricultural Association, it is natural to keep espe- 
cially in mind the two bodies who compose the majority of our 
people and upon whose welfare depends the welfare of the entire 
State. If circumstances are such that thrift, energy, industry, 
and forethought enable the farmer, the tiller of the soil, on the 
one hand, and the wage-worker, on the other, to keep themselves, 
their wives, and their children in reasonable comfort, then the 
State is well off, and we can be assured that the other classes in 
the community will Hkewise prosper. On the other hand, if 
there is in the long run a lack of prosperity among the two classes 
named, then all other prosperity is sure to be more seeming than 
real. It has been our profound good fortune as a nation that 
hitherto, disregarding exceptional periods of depression and the 
normal and inevitable fluctuations, there has been, on the whole, 
from the beginning of our Government to the present day a pro- 
gressive betterment alike in the condition of the tiller of the soil 
and in the condition of the man who, by his manual skill and 
labor, supports himself and his family, and endeavors to bring 
up his children so that they may be at least as well off as, and 
if possible better off than, he himself has been. There are, of 
course, exceptions, but as a whole the standard of Hving among 
the farmers of our country has risen from generation to genera- 
tion, and the wealth represented on the farms has steadily in- 
creased, while the wages of labor have likewise risen, both as 
regards the actual money paid and as regards the purchasing 
power which that money represents. 

Side by side with this increase in the prosperity of the wage- 

II [2] 



THE DANGER 

worker and the tiller of the soil has gone on a great increase in 
prosperity among the business men and among certain classes of 
professional men; and the prosperity of these men has been 
partly the cause and partly the consequence of the prosperity of 
farmer and wage-worker. It can not be too often repeated that 
in this country, in the long run, we all of us tend to go up or go 
down together. If the average of well-being is high, it means 
that the average wage worker, the average farmer, and the aver- 
age business man are all alike well off. If the average shrinks, 
there is not one of these classes which will not feel the shrinkage. 
Of course there are always some men who are not affected by 
good times, just as there are some men who are not affected by 
bad times. But speaking broadly, it is true that if prosperity 
comes, all of us tend to share more or less therein, and that if 
adversity comes, each of us, to a greater or less extent, feels the 
tension. Unfortunately, in this world the innocent frequently 
find themselves obhged to pay some of the penalty for the mis-. 
deeds of the guilty ; and so if hard times come, whether they be 
due to our own fault or to our misfortune ; whether they be due 
to some burst of speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of 
the business world to lose its head — a loss which no legislation 
can possibly supply; or whether they be due to any lack of wis- 
dom in a portion of the world of labor — in each case the trouble 
once started is felt more or less in every walk of hf e. 

It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national 
life that we should recognize this community of interest among 
our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamen- 
tally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public hfe 
that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do 
good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose en- 
deavor it is, not to represent any special class and promote 
merely that class's selfish interests, but to represent all true and 
honest men of all sections and all classes, and to work for their 
interests by working for our common country. 

We can keep our Government on a sane and healthy basis, 
we can make and keep our social system what it should be, only 
on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, 
but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our 

n [3] 



THE ^NGER 

American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, 
to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or 
to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the dis- 
tinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do 
well and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There are 
good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locahty 
and the attitude of decent people toward great pubhc and social 
questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions 
of employment or locahty, but by those deep-set principles which 
represent the innermost souls of men. 

The failure in pubhc and in private life thus to treat each man 
on his own merits, the recognition of this Government as being 
either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove 
fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have 
always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy 
republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon 
classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a 
class or by a section it departs from the old American ideal. 

It is, of course, the merest truism to say that free institutions 
are of avail only to people who possess the high and peculiar 
characteristics needed to take advantage of such institutions. 
The century that has just closed has witnessed many and lamen- 
table instances in which people have seized a government free m 
form, or have had it bestowed upon them, and yet have per- 
mitted it under the forms of liberty to become some species of 
despotism or anarchy, because they did not have in them the 
power to make this seeming liberty one of deed instead of one 
merely of word. Under such circumstances the seeming liberty 
may be supplanted by a tyranny or despotism in the first place, 
or it may reach the road of despotism by the path of hcense and 
anarchy. It matters but Httle which road is taken. In either 
case the same goal is reached. People show themselves just as 
unfit for liberty whether they submit to anarchy or to tyranny; 
and class government, whether it be the government of a plu- 
tocracy or the government of a mob, is equally incompatible with 
the principles established in the days of Washington and per- 
petuated in the days of Lincoln. 

Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve 

II [4] 



THE DANGER 

the power of self-government in fact as well as in name. Among 
these qualities are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the 
courage which refuses to abandon one's own rights, and the dis- 
interested and kindly good sense which enables one to do justice 
to the rights of others. Lack of strength and lack of courage 
unfit men for self-government on the one hand; and on the 
other, brutal arrogance, envy — in short, any manifestation of the 
spirit of selfish disregard, whether of one's own duties or of the 
rights of others, are equally fatal. 

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have 
flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because 
their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby 
of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power 
been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the 
Government into a government primarily for the benefit of one 
class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a 
whole. 

Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in 
those of mediaeval Italy and mediaeval Flanders, this tendency 
was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invari- 
ably and inevitably proved fatal to the State. In the final result 
it mattered not one whit whether the movement was in favor of 
one class or of another. The outcome was equally fatal, whether 
the country fell into the hands of a wealthy oligarchy which ex- 
ploited the poor or whether it fell under the domination of a 
turbulent mob which plundered the rich. In both cases there 
resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a 
final complete loss of hberty to all citizens — destruction in the 
end overtaking the class which had for the moment been vic- 
torious, as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. 
The death-knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active 
power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do 
justice to all citizens, rich and poor ahke, but to stand for one 
special class and for its interests as. opposed to the interests of 
others. 

The reason why our future is assured lies in the fact that our 
people are genuinely skilled in and fitted for self-government and 
therefore will spurn the leadership of those who seek to excite / 
n [5] 



THI^ANGER 



this ferocious and foolish class antagonism. The average Ameri- 
can knows not only that he himself intends to do about what is 
right, but that his average fellow-countryman has the same in- 
tention and the same power to make his intention effective. He 
knows, whether he be business man, professional man, farmer, 
mechanic, employer, or wage-worker, that the welfare of each of 
these men is bound up with the welfare of all the others; that 
each is neighbor to the other, is actuated by the same hopes and 
fears, has fundamentally the same ideals, and that all ahke have 
much the same virtues and the same faults. Our average fellow- 
citizen is a sane and healthy man, who beheves in decency and 
has a wholesome mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn alike 
for the man of wealth guilty of the mean and base spirit of arro- 
gance toward those who are less well off, and for the man of small 
means who in his turn either feels or seeks to excite in others the 
f ecUng of mean and base envy for those who are better off. The 
two feelings, envy and arrogance, are but opposite sides of the 
same shield, but different developments of the same spirit. 
Fundamentally, the unscrupulous rich man who seeks to exploit 
and oppress those who are less well off is in spirit not opposed to, 
but identical with, the unscrupulous poor man who desires to 
plunder and oppress those who are better off. The courtier and 
the demagogue are but developments of the same type under 
different conditions, each manifesting the same servile spirit, the 
same desire to rise by pandering to base passions; though one 
panders to power in the shape of a single man and the other to 
power in the shape of a multitude. So likewise the man who 
wishes to rise by wronging others must by right be contrasted, 
not with the man who hkewise wishes to do wrong, though to a 
different set of people, but with the man who wishes to do justice 
to all people and to wrong none. 

The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship Ues, 
not between the man of wealth who acts squarely by his fellows 
and the man who seeks each day's wage by that day's work, 
wronging no one and doing his duty by his neighbor; nor yet 
does this hne of cleavage divide the unscrupulous wealthy man 
who exploits others in his own interest, from the demagogue, or 
from the sullen and envious being who wishes to attack all men 
II [6] 



THE DANGER . 

of property, whether they do well or ill. On the contrary, the 
line of cleavage between good citizenship and bad citizenship 
separates the rich man who does well from the rich man who 
does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad 
conduct. This hne of cleavage hes at right angles to any such 
arbitrary line of division as that separating one class from 
another, one locality from another, or men with a certain degree 
of property from those of a less degree of property. 

The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his 
poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, 
to his neighbor, to the State; who is incapable of the baseness 
which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who, 
while demanding justice for himself, is no less scrupulous to do 
justice to others. It is because the average American citizen, 
rich or poor, is of just this type that we have cause for our pro- 
found faith in the future of the RepubHc. 

Ours is a government of Hberty, by, through, and under the 
law. Lawlessness and connivance at law-breaking — whether 
the law-breaking take the form of a crime of greed and cunning 
or of a crime of violence — are destructive not only of order, but 
of the true Uberties which can only come through order. If 
aUve to their true interests, rich and poor alike will set their faces 
like flint against the spirit which seeks personal advantage by 
overriding the laws, without regard to whether this spirit shows 
itself in the form of bodily violence by one set of men or in the 
form of vulpine cunning by another set of men. 

Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar 
watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-deahng, and common- 
sense. The quahties denoted by these words are essential to all 
of us, as we deal with the complex industrial problems of to-day, 
the problems affecting not merely the accumulation but even 
more the wise distribution of wealth. We ask no man's permis- 
sion when we require him to obey the law ; neither the permission 
of the poor man nor yet of the rich man. Least of all can the 
man of great wealth afford to break the law, even for his own 
financial advantage ; for the law is his prop and support, and it 
is both foohsh and profoundly unpatriotic for him to fail in 
giving hearty support to those who show that there is in very fact 

n [7] 



THIWDANGER 



one law, and one law only, alike for the rich and the poor, for the 
great and the small. 

Men sincerely interested in the due protection of property, 
and men sincerely interested in seeing that the just rights of 
labor are guaranteed, should alike remember not only that in the 
^ long run neither the capitalist nor the wage- worker can be helped 
in healthy fashion save by helping the other; but also that to 
require either side to obey the law and do its full duty toward the 
community is emphatically to that side's real interest. 

There is no worse enemy of the wage-worker than the man 
who condones mob violence in any shape or who preaches class 
hatred; and surely the slightest acquaintance with our industrial 
history should teach even the most short-sighted that the times 
of most suffering for our people as a whole, the times when busi- 
ness is stagnant, and capital suffers from shrinkage and gets no 
return from its investments, are exactly the times of hardship, 
and want, and grim disaster among the poor. If all the existing 
instrumentahties of wealth could be abohshcd, the first and 
severest suffering would come among those of us who are least 
well off at present. The wage- worker is well off only when the 
rest of the country is well off; and he can best contribute to this 
general well-being by showing sanity and a firm purpose to do 
justice to others. 

In his turn the capitaKst who is really a conservative, the man 
who has forethought as well as patriotism, should heartily wel- 
come every effort, legislative or otherwise, which has for its ob- 
ject to secure fair deahng by capital, corporate or individual, 
toward the pubhc and toward the employee. Such laws as the 
franchise-tax law in this State, which the Court of Appeals 
recently unanimously decided constitutional; such a law as that 
passed in Congress last year for the purpose of establishing a 
Department of Commerce and Labor, under which there should 
be a bureau to oversee and secure pubhcity from the great cor- 
porations which do an interstate business; such a law as that 
passed at the same time for the regulation of the great highways 
of commerce so as to keep these roads clear on fair terms to all 
producers in getting their goods to market — these laws are in the 
interest not merely of the people as a whole, but of the propertied 
II [8] 



THE DANGER 

classes. For in no way is the stability of property better assured 
than by making it patent to our people that property bears its 
proper share of the burdens of the State; that property is 
handled not only in the interest of the owner, but in the interest 
of the whole community. 

In other words, legislation to be permanently good for any 
class must also be good for the nation as a whole; and legislation 
which does injustice to any class is certain to work harm to the 
nation. Take our currency system, for example. This nation 
is on a gold basis. The Treasury of the public is in excellent 
condition. Never before has the per capita of circulation been 
as large as it is this day; and this circulation, moreover, is of 
money, every dollar of which is at par with gold. Now, our 
having this sound currency system is of benefit to banks, of 
course, but it is of infinitely more benefit to the people as a whole, 
because of the healthy eilect on business conditions. 

In the same way, whatever is advisable in the way of remedial 
or corrective currency legislation — and nothing revolutionary is 
advisable under present conditions — must be undertaken only 
from the standpoint of the business community as a whole, that 
is, of the American body politic as a whole. Whatever is done, 
we cannot afford to take any step backward or to cast any doubt 
upon the certain redemption in standard coin of every circulating 
note. 

Among ourselves we differ in many quahties, of body, head, 
and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as well as 
physically. But each of us has the right to ask that he shall be 
protected from wrongdoing as he does his work and carries his 
burden through Ufc. No man needs sympathy because he has 
to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the 
best prize that Hfe offers is the chance to work hard at work 
worth doing; and this is a prize open to every man, for there can 
be no work better worth doing than that done to keep in health 
and comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately 
dependent upon the husband, the father, or the son. 

There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere 
idler, for the man or the woman whose object it is throughout 
hfe to shirk the duties which hfe ought to bring. Life can mean 

n [9] 



THE^ANGER 



nothing worth meaning, unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, 
the achievement of results worth achieving. A recent writer has 
finely said: "After all, the saddest thing that can happen to a 
man is to carry no burdens. To be bent under too great a load 
is bad; to be crushed by it is lamentable; but even in that there 
are possibiUties that are glorious. But to carry no load at all — 
there is nothing in that. No one seems to arrive at any goal 
really worth reaching in this world who does not come to it heavy 
laden." 

Surely from our own experience each one of us knows that 
this is true. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and 
usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of Ufe 
is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not 
shirked hfe's burdens. The men whom we most dehght to 
honor in all this land are those who, in the iron years from '6i to 
'65, bore on their shoulders the burden of saving the Union. 
They did not choose the easy task. They did not shirk the 
difficult duty. Deliberately and of their own free will they 
strove for an ideal, upward and onward across the stony slopes 
of greatness. They did the hardest work that was then to be 
done; they bore the heaviest burden that any generation of 
Americans ever had to bear; and because they did this they have 
won such proud joy as it has fallen to the lot of no other men to 
win, and have written their names forevermore on the golden 
honor roll of the nation. As it is with the soldier, so it is with the 
civiHan. To win success in the business world, to become a 
first-class mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or 
doctor, means that the man has devoted his best energy and 
power through long years to the achievement of his ends. So it 
is in the Hfe of the family, upon which in the last analysis the 
whole welfare of the nation rests. The man or woman who as 
bread-winner and home-maker, or as wife and mother, has done 
all that he or she can do, patiently and uncomplainingly, is to be 
honored, and is to be envied by all those who have never had the 
good fortune to feel the need and duty of doing such work. The 
woman who has borne, and who has reared as they should be 
reared, a family of children, has in the most emphatic manner 
deserved well of the RepubHc. Her burden has been heavy, and 
II [10] 



THE DANGER 

she has been able to bear it worthily only by the possession of 
resolution, of good sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness. 
But if she has borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme 
blessing, for in the words of the oldest and greatest of books, 
"Her children shall rise up and call her blessed"; and among 
the benefactors of the land her place must be with those who 
have done the best and the hardest work whether as law-givers or 
as soldiers, whether in pubhc or in private life. 

This is not a soft and easy creed to preach. It is a creed 
wiUingly learned only by men and women who, together with the 
softer virtues, possess also the stronger; who can do, and dare, 
and die at need, but who while hfe lasts will never flinch from 
their allotted task. You farmers, and wage-workers, and busi- 
ness men of this great State, of this mighty and wonderful nation, 
are gathered together to-day, proud of your State and still 
prouder of your Nation, because your forefathers and prede- 
cessors have lived up to just this creed. You have received from 
their hands a great inheritance, and you will leave an even greater 
inheritance to your children and your children's children, pro- 
vided only that you practise alike in your private and your pubhc 
lives the strong virtues that have given us as a people greatness in 
the past. It is not enough to be well-meaning and kindly, but 
weak; neither is it enough to be strong, unless morahty and 
decency go hand in hand with strength. We must possess the 
quahties which make us do our duty in our homes and among 
our neighbors, and in addition we must possess the quahties 
which are indispensable to the makeup of every great and 
masterful nation — the qualities of courage and hardihood, of 
individual initiative and yet of power to combine for a common 
end, and, above all, the resolute determination to permit no man 
and no set of men to sunder us one from the other by hues of 
caste or creed or section. We must act upon the motto of all for 
each and each for all. There must be ever present in our minds 
the fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only 
safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is 
rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupa- 
tion or another, because he works with his brains or because he 
works with his hands. We must treat each man on his worth 
n [ii] 



THITDANGER 



and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square 
deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. 
Finally we must keep ever in mind that a rcpubhc such as ours 
can exist only by virtue of the orderly hbcrty which comes 
through the equal domination of the law over all men ahkc, and 
through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion 
as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it. 



II [12 3 



Ill 



THE BELIEFS 

"RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND MIRACLE" 

BY 

SIR OLIVER LODGE 

PRESIDENT OF BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND 



CT^HERE is one element oj our being that, in many minds, is 
-*■ so deeply interwoven with every aspect of thought, one 
question so omnipresent, that no search into the meaning of life 
can far advance without that question being raised. What atti- 
tude does the search assume toward religious faith ? This does 
not necessarily inquire into the particular sect or creed of the 
searcher. We have reached a point where even the most militant 
apostle, the one most satisfied as to the value and accuracy of his 
own beliefs, has ceased to enforce their acceptance upon his 
neighbor. Some of us might even admit that our heretic neighbor 
was the better man. 

We are all, however, more or less fully aware that some time 
duri?ig the last half-century certain Scientists and certain Church- 
men engaged in a somewhat vehement and wordy war. With the 
details of this strife most of us are not wholly familiar. It cen- 
tred, we know, upon evolution and upon Adam. Perhaps many 
of us were unwilling to know more. We avoided inquiry lest our 
religious faith be shaken by scientific ideas of whose value we were 
incompetent to judge. Yet in this very withdrawal of ourselves, 
there were elements of uncertainty, of fear. The spirit of faith 
was disturbed, even if not made doubtful, in each thoughtful mind. 

To all, therefore, who have not closely followed the course of the 
contest, the two following addresses must come as a relief. They 
show that this controversy, like many another, begins to be re- 
garded as a thing of the past, that religious faith still survives 

m [ I ] 



THE^ELIEFS 

even in the minds of many philosophers the most " advanced." 
Sir Oliver Lodge, M.Sc., F.R.S., D.Sc, LL.D., is among the 
most widely known oj British scientists. Perhaps he has done 
more than any other living man to bring scientific knowledge into 
the minds of the common people. Moreover, as head of one of the 
leading English universities, that of Birmingham, he has done 
much for the cause of higher education. Among the many honors 
which have come to him is that of being made, in 1905, President 
of the Social and Political Education League. The material of 
the following address is substantially that of a lecture recently 
delivered by him to his students at Birmingham, though it was 
rearranged for publication. The Duke of Northumberland ranks 
high among the great lords of the British Empire, as well as 
among the great scientific writers of the world. His religious 
attitude has ahvays shown closer clinging to old forms of faith than 
that of the radical scientist and is well worth comparing with that 
of Sir Oliver. 

In brief, religion has but passed through another of those 
crises common to all tilings that live and grow. Again and again 
in the course of ages, in Luther'' s time, in Galileo^ s, in other epochs 
and with other faiths less widely known, have the very foundations 
of the '^living faith" seemed undermined. In other days even 
more perhaps than now, have men who loved and feared, shut 
their eyes in terror and turned away from the threatened- downfall. 
Yet when the despairing mourners looked again, behold, the storm 
had passed them by; and belief in God, a living principle in the 
hearts of men, rose up mighty as ever, unshaken and eternal. 



SCIENCE AND RELIGION 

There was a time when religious people distrusted the in- 
crease of knowledge, and condemned the mental attitude which 
takes delight in its pursuit, being in dread lest part of the 
foundation of their faith should be undermined by a too ruth- 
less and unqualified spirit of investigation. 

There has been a time when men engaged in the quest of 

III [ 2 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

systematic knowledge had an idea that the results of their 
studies would be destructive not only of outlying accretions but 
of substantial portions of the edifice of religion which has been 
gradually erected by the prophets and saints of humanity. 

Both these epochs are now nearly over. All men realize 
that truth is the important thing, and that to take refuge in 
any shelter less substantial than the truth is but to deceive 
themselves and become liable to abject exposure when a storm 
comes on. On the other hand most men are aware that it is 
a sign of unbalanced judgment to conclude, on the strength of 
a few momentous discoveries, that the whole structure of re- 
ligious belief built up through the ages by the developing human 
race from fundamental emotions and instincts and experiences, 
is unsubstantial and insecure. • 

The business of science, including in that term, for present 
purposes, philosophy and the science of criticism, is with founda- 
tions; the business of religion is with superstructure. Science 
has laboriously laid a solid foundation of great strength, and its 
votaries have rejoiced over it ; though their joy must perforce be 
somewhat dumb and inexpressive until the more vocal apostles 
of art and literature and music are able to utilize it for their more 
aerial and winsome kind of building; so for the present the work 
of science strikes strangers as severe and forbidding. In a 
neighboring territory ReHgion occupies a splendid building — a 
gorgeously decorated palace; concerning which. Science, not 
yet having discovered a substantial and satisfactory basis, is 
sometimes inclined to suspect that it is phantasmal and mainly 
supported on legend. 

Without any controversy it may be admitted that the founda- 
tion and the superstructure as at present known do not corre- 
spond ; and hence that there is an apparent dislocation. Men of 
science have exclaimed that in their possession is t-he only 
foundation of solid truth, adopting in that sense the words of 
the poet : 

To the solid ground 
Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye. 

While on the other hand men of Religion, snugly ensconced in their 
traditional eyrie, and objecting to the digging and the hammer- 
in [ 3 ] 



THE^LIEFS 

ing below, have shuddered as the artificial props and pillars by 
which they supposed it to be buttressed gave way one after 
another; and have doubted whether they could continue to 
enjoy peace in their ancient fortress if it turned out that part of it 
was suspended in air, without any perceptible foundation at all, 
like the phantom city in "Gareth and Lynette" whereof it 
could be said ; 

the city is built 

To music, therefore never built at all 

And therefore built for ever. 

Remarks as to lack of solid foundation may be regarded 
as typical of the mild kind of sarcasm which people with a 
superficial smattering of popular science sometimes try to pour 
upon religion. They think that to accuse a system of being de- 
void of soHd foundation is equivalent to denying its stability. 
On the contrary, as Tennyson no doubt perceived, the absence 
of anything that may crumble or be attacked and knocked away, 
or that can be shaken by an earthquake, is a safeguard rather 
than a danger. It is the absence of material foundation that 
makes the Earth itself, for instance, so secure : if it were based 
upon a pedestal, or otherwise solidly supported, we might be 
anxious about the stability and durabihty of the support. As it 
is, it floats securely in the emptiness of space. Similarly the 
persistence of its diurnal spin is secured by the absence of any- 
thing to stop it : not by any maintaining mechanism. 

To say that a system does not rest upon one special fact is not 
to impugn its stability. The body of scientific truth rests on no 
sohtary material fact or group of facts, but on a basis of harmony 
and consistency between facts: its support and ultimate sanction 
is of no material character. To conceive of Christianity as 
built upon an Empty Tomb, or any other plain physical or his- 
torical fact, is dangerous. To base it upon the primary facts of 
consciousness or upon direct spiritual experience, as Paul did, 
is safer.^ There are parts of the structure of Religion which 

1 It will be represented that I am here intending to cast doubt 
upon a fundamental tenet of the Church. That is not my intention. 
My contention here is merely that a great structure should not rest 
upon a point. So might a lawyer properly say; "To base a legal 

HI [ 4 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

may safely be underpinned by physical science: the theory of 
death and of continued personal existence is one of them ; there 
are many others, and there will be more. But there are and 
always will be vast religious regions for which that kind of 
scientific foundation would be an impertinence, though a 
scientific contribution is appropriate; perhaps these may be 
summed up in some such phrase as "the relation of the soul 
to God." 

Assertions are made concerning material facts in the name 
of religion ; these science is bound to criticise. Testimony is 
borne to inner personal experience; on that physical science does 
well to be silent. Nevertheless many of us are impressed with 
the conviction that everything in the universe may become in- 
telligible if we go the right way to work ; and so we are coming to 
recognize, on the one hand, that every system of truth must be 
intimately connected with every other, and that this connection 
will constitute a trustworthy support as soon as it is revealed by 
the progress of knowledge , and on the other hand, that the ex- 
tensive foundation of truth now being laid by scientific workers 
will ultimately support a gorgeous building of aesthetic feeling 
and rehgious faith. 

Theologians have been apt to be too easily satisfied with a 
pretended foundation that would not tand scientific scrutiny; 
they seem to believe that the religious edifice, with its mighty 
halls for the human spirit, can rest upon some event or statement, 
instead of upon man's nature as a whole; and they are apt to 
decline to reconsider their formulae in the light of fuller knowl- 
edge and development. 

Scientific men on the other hand have been liable to suppose 
that no foundation which they have not themselves laid can be 
of a substantial character, thereby ignoring the possibility of an 
ancestral accumulation of sound though unformulated experi- 
ence; and a few of the less considerate, about a quarter of a cen- 
tury ago, amused themselves by instituting a kind of jubilant 
rat-hunt under the venerable theological edifice: a procedure 

decision upon the position of a comma, or other punctuation— how- 
ever undisputed its occurrence — is dangerous; to base it upon the 
general sense of a document is safer." — O. L. , 

III [5] 



THE^LIEFS 

necessarily obnoxious to its occupants. The exploration was 
unpleasant, but its results have been purifying and healthful, and 
the permanent substratum of fact will in due time be cleared of 
the decaying refuse of centuries. 

Some of the chief hurly-burly of contention between the 
apparently attacking force and the ostensibly defending garrison 
arose round that bulwark which upholds the possibility of the 
Miraculous, and the efficacy of Prayer. It will be sufficient if in 
this Address I discuss these two connected subjects. 



II 

MEANING OF MIRACLE 

I have to begin by saying that the term "miracle" is ambig- 
uous, and that no discussion which takes that term as a basis 
can be very fruitful, since the combatants may all be meaning 
different things. 

(i) One user of the term may mean merely an unusual event 
of which we do not know the history and cause, a bare wonder or 
prodigy; such an event as the course of nature may, for all we 
know, bring about once in ten thousand years or so, leaving no 
record of its occurrence in the past and no anticipatory prob- 
ability of its re-occurrence in the future. The raining down of 
fire on Sodom, or on Pompeii; the sudden engulfing of Korah, 
or of Marcus Curtius; or, on a different plane, the advent of 
some transcendent genius, or even of a personality so lofty as to 
be called divine, may serve as examples. 

(2) Another employer of the term "miracle" may add to 
this idea a definite hypothesis, and may mean an act due to un- 
known intelHgent and living agencies operating in a self-willed 
and unpredictable manner, thus effecting changes that would 
not otherwise have occurred and that are not in the regular 
course of nature. The easiest example to think of is one wherein 
the lower animals are chiefly concerned; for instance, consider 
the case of the community of an ant hill, on a lonely uninhabited 
island, undisturbed for centuries, whose dwelhng is kicked over 
one day by a shipwrecked sailor. They had reason to suppose 
III [ 6 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

that events, were uniform, and all their difficulties ancestrally 
known, but they are perturbed by an unintelhgible miracle. 
A different illustration is afforded by the presence of an ob- 
trusive but unsuspected live insect in a galvanometer or other 
measuring instrument in a physical laboratory; whereby metri- 
cal observations would be complicated, and all regularity per- 
turbed in a puzzling and capricious and, to half-instructed 
knowledge, supernatural, or even diabolical, manner. Not dis- 
similar are some of the asserted events in a Seance Room. 

(3) Another may use the term "miracle" to mean the utili- 
zation of unknown laws, say of healing or of communication; 
laws unknown and unformulated, but instinctively put into 
operation by mental activity of some kind — sometimes through 
the unconscious influence of so-called self-suggestion, sometimes 
through the activity of another mind, or through the personal 
agency of highly gifted beings, operating on others ; laws where- 
by time and space appear temporarily suspended, or extraor- 
dinary cures are effected, or other effects produced, such as 
the levitations and other physical phenomena related of the 
saints. 

(4) Another may incorporate with the word "miracle" a 
still further infusion of theory, and may mean always a direct 
interposition of Divine Providence, whereby at some one time 
and place a perfectly unique occurrence is brought about, which 
is out of relation with the established order of things, is not due 
to what has gone before, and is not likely to occur again. The 
most striking examples of what can be claimed under this head 
are connected with the personality of Jesus Christ, notably the 
Virgin Birth and the Empty Tomb; by which I mean the more 
material and controversial aspects of those generally accepted 
doctrines — the Incarnation and the Resurrection. 

To summarize this part, the four categories are: (i) A 
natural or orderly though unusual portent, (2) a disturbance 
due to unknown live or capricious agencies, (3) a utilization by 
mental or spiritual power of unknown laws, (4) direct inter- 
position of the Deity. 



ni [7] 



THB«ELIEFS 



III 

ARGUMENTS CONCERNING THE MIRACULOUS 

In some cases an argument concerning the so-called miracu- 
lous will turn upon the question whether such things are theoreti- 
cally possible. 

In other cases it will turn upon whether or not they have ever 
actually happened. 

In a third case the argument will be directed to the question 
whether they happened or not on some particular occasion. 

And in a fourth case the argument will hinge upon the par- 
ticular category under which any assigned occurrence is to be 
placed : 

For instance take a circumstance which undoubtedly has 
occurred, one upon the actual existence of which there can be no 
dispute, and yet one of which the history and manner is quite 
unknown. Take for instance the origin of life; or to be more 
definite, say the origin of life on any given planet, the Earth for 
instance. There is practically no doubt that the Earth was 
once a hot and molten and sterile globe. There is no doubt at 
all that it is now the abode of an immense variety of Hving or- 
ganic nature. How did that life arise? Is it an event to be 
placed under head (i), as an unexpected outcome of the ordi- 
nary course of nature, a development naturally following upon 
the formation of extremely complex molecular aggregates — pro- 
toplasm and the Hke — as the Earth cooled ; or must it be placed 
under head (4), as due to the direct Fiat of the Eternal ? 

Again, take the existence of Christianity as a living force in 
the world of to-day. This is based upon a series of events of 
undoubtedly substantial truth centering round a historical per- 
sonage; under which category is that to be placed? Was his 
advent to be regarded as analogous to the appearance of a mighty 
genius such as may at anytime revolutionize the course of human 
history; or is he to be regarded as a direct manifestation and 
incarnation of the Deity Himself ? 

I am using these great themes as illustrations merely, for our 
Dresent purpose ; I have no intention of entering upon them here 

III [8] 



THE BELIEFS 

and now. They are questions which have been asked, and pre- 
sumably answered, again and again; and it is on lines such as 
these that debates concerning the miraculous arc usually con- 
ducted. But what I want to say is that so long as we keep the 
discussion on these lines, and ask this sort of cjucstion, though 
we shall succeed in raising difficulties, we shall not progress far 
toward a solution of any of them : nor shall we gain much aid 
toward life. 

IV 

LAW AND GUIDANCE 

The way to progress is not thus to lose ourselves in detail and 
in confusing estimates of possibilities, but to consider two main 
issues which may very briefly be formulated thus : 
(i) Are we to believe in unbreakable law ? 
(2) Are we to beheve in spiritual guidance ? 

If we accept only the first of these issues we accept an orderly 
and systematic universe, with no arbitrary cataclysms and no 
breaks in its essential continuity. Catastrophes occur, but they 
occur in the regular course of events, they are not brought about 
by capricious and lawless agencies; they are a part of the entire 
cosmos, regulated on the principle of unity and uniformity: 
though to the dwellers in any time and place, from whose senses 
most of the cosmos is hidden, they may appear to be sudden and 
portentous dislocations of natural order. 

So much is granted if we accept the first of the above issues. 
If we accept the second, we accept a purposeful and directed 
universe, carrying on its evolutionary processes from an inevit- 
able past into an anticipated future with a definite aim; not left 
to the random control of inorganic forces like a motor-car which 
has lost its driver, but permeated throughout by mind and inten- 
tion and foresight and will. Not mere energy, but constantly 
directed energy — the energy being controlled by something 
which is not energy, nor akin to energy, something which pre- 
sumably is immanent in the universe and is akin to life and 
mind. 

The alternative to these two beliefs is a universe of random 
III [ 9 ] 



THE^ELIEFS 

chance and capricious disorder, not a cosmos or universe at all — 
a multi verse rather; consequently I take it that we all hold to 
one or other of these two beliefs. But do we and can we hold 
to both ? 

So far as I conceive my present mission, it is to urge that 
the two behefs are not inconsistent with each other, and that we 
may and should contemplate and gradually feel our way toward 
accepting both. 

(i) We must realize that the Whole is a single undeviat- 

ing law-saturated cosmos; 
(2) But we must also realize that the Whole consists not 
of matter and motion alone, nor yet of spirit and will 
alone, but of both and all; we must even yet further, 
and enormously, enlarge our conception of what the 
Whole contains. 
Scientific men have preached the first of these desiderata, but 
have been liable to take a narrow view regarding the second. 
Keenly alive on law, and knowledge, and material fact, they have 
been occasionally blind to art, to emotion, to poetry, and to the 
higher mental and spiritual environment which inspires and 
glorifies the realm of knowledge. 

The temptation of rehgious men has also lain in the direc- 
tion of too narrow an exclusiveness, for they have been so 
occupied with their own conceptions of the fulness of things 
that they have failed to grasp what is meant by the first of 
the above requirements; they have allowed the emotional 
content to overpower the intellectual, and have too often 
ignored, disHked, and practically rejected an integral por- 
tion of the scheme — appearing to desire, what no one can 
really wish for, a world of uncertainty and caprice, where 
effects can be produced without adequate cause, and where 
the connection of antecedent and consequent can be arbitrarily 
dislocated. 

The same vice has therefore dogged the steps of both classes 
of men. The acceptance of miracle, in the crude sense of 
arbitrary intervention and special providence, is appropriate to 
those who feel enmeshed in the grip of inorganic and mechanical 
law, without being able to reconcile it with the idea of constant 
ui [10] 



THE BELIEFS 

guidance and intelligent control. And a denial of miracle, in 
every sense, that is of all providential guidance, and all control- 
ling intelligence, may also be the result of the very same feeling, 
experienced by people who are conscious of just the same kind of 
inability — people who cannot recognize a directing intelligence 
in the midst of law and order, and hence regard the absence of 
dislocation and interference as a mark of the inorganic, the 
mechanical, the inexorable : wherefore the denial of miracle has 
often led to a sort of practical atheism and to an assertion of the 
valuelessness of prayer. 

But to those who are able to combine the acceptance of both 
the above faiths, prayer is part of the orderly cosmos, and may be 
an efficient portion of the guiding and controlhng will; some- 
what as the desire of the inhabitants of a town for a civic im- 
provement may be a part of the agency which ultimately brings 
it about, no matter whether the city be representatively or auto- 
cratically governed. 

The two behefs cannot be logically and effectively combined 
by those who think of themselves as something detached from 
and outside the cosmos, operating on it externally and seeking 
to modify its manifestations by vain petitions addressed to a 
system of ordered force. To such persons the above proposi- 
tions must seem contradictory or mutually exclusive. But if we 
can grasp the idea that we ourselves are an intimate part of the 
whole scheme, that our wishes and desires are a part of the con- 
trolling and guiding will — then our mental action cannot but be 
efficient, if we exercise it in accordance with the highest and 
truest laws of our being. 

V 

HUMAN EXPERIENCE 

Let US survey our position : 

We find ourselves for a few score years incarnate intelligences 
on this planet ; we have not always been here, and we shall not 
always be here : we are here, in fact, each of us, for but a very 
short period, but we can study the conditions of existence while 
here, and we perceive clearly that a certain amount of guidance 
m [ II ] 



THE^ELIEFS 

and control is in our hands. For better for worse we can, and 
our legislators do, influence the destinies of the planet. The 
process is called "making history." We can all, even the 
humblest, to some extent influence the destinies of individuals 
with whom we come into contact. We have therefore a certain 
sense of power and responsibility. 

It is not likely that we are the only, or the highest, intelligent 
agents in the whole wide universe, nor that we possess faculties 
and powers denied to all else; nor is it likely that our own ac- 
tivity will be always as limited as it is now. The Parable of the 
Talents is full of meaning, and it contains a meaning that is not 
often brought out. 

It is absurd to deny the attributes of guidance and intelligence 
and personality and love to the Whole, seeing that we arc part of 
the Whole, and are personally aware of what we mean by those 
words in ourselves. These attributes are existent, therefore, and 
cannot be denied ; cannot be denied even to the Deity. 

Is the planet subject to intelligent control ? We know that it 
is : we ourselves can change the course of rivers for predestined 
ends, we can make highways, can unite oceans, can devise in- 
ventions, can make new compounds, can transmute species, can 
plan fresh variety of organic life; we can create works of art; 
we can embody new ideas and lofty emotions in forms of lan- 
guage and music, and can leave them as Platonic offspring 
(vide Symposium) to remote posterity. Our power is doubtless 
limited, but we can surely learn to do far more than we have yet 
so far in the infancy of humanity accornphshed ; more even than 
we have yet conjectured as within the range of possibility. 

Our progress already has been considerable. It is but a 
moderate time since our greatest men were chipping flints and 
carving bones into the likeness of reindeer. More recently they 
became able to build cathedrals and make poems. Now we are 
momentarily diverted from immortal pursuits by vivid interest 
in that kind of competition which has replaced the competition 
of the sword, and by those extraordinary inequalities of posses- 
sion and privilege which have resulted from the invention of an 
indestructible and transmissible form of riches, a form over 
which neither moth nor rust has any power. We raise an in- 

in [ 12 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

cense of smoke, and offer sacrifices of squalor and ugliness, in 
worship of this new idol. But it will pass; human Hfe is not 
meant to continue as it is now in city slums; nor is the strenuous 
futihty of mere accumulation Hkely to satisfy people when once 
they have been really educated ; the world is beautiful, and may 
be far more widely happy than it has been yet. Those who have 
preached this hitherto have been heard with deaf ears, but 
some day we shall awake to a sense of our true planetary im- 
portance and shall recognize the higher possibiHties of existence. 
Then shall we realize and practically believe what is involved in 
those words of poetic insight : 

"The heaven, even the heavens are the Lord's : but the earth 
hath he given to the children of men." 

There is a vast truth in this yet to be discovered ; power and in- 
fluence and responsibility lie before us, appalhng in their magni- 
tude, and as yet we are but children playing on the stage before 
the curtain is rolled up for the drama in which we are to take 
part. 

But we are not left to our own devices: we of this living 
generation are not alone in the universe. What we call the in- 
dividual is strengthened by elements emerging from the social 
whole out of which he is born. We are not things of yesterday, 
nor of to-morrow. We do not indeed remember our past, we 
are not aware of our future, but in common with everything else 
we must have had a past and must be going to have a future. 
Some day we may find ourselves able to realize both. 

Meanwhile what has been our experience here? We have 
not been left solitary. Every newcomer to the planet, however 
helpless and strange he be, finds friends awaiting him, devoted 
and self-sacrificing friends, eager to care for and protect his in- 
fancy- and to train him in the ways of this curious world. It is 
typical of what goes on throughout conscious existence; the 
guidance which we exert, and to which we are subject now, is but 
a phase of something running through the universe; and when 
the time comes for us to quit this sphere and enter some larger 
field of action, I doubt not that we shall find there also that kind- 
ness and help and patience and love, without which no existence 
would be tolerable or even at some stages possible. 

Ill [ 13 ] 



THE^ELIEFS 



Miracles lie all around us: only they are not miraculous. 
Special providences envelop us: only they are not special. 
Prayer is a means of communication as natural and as simple 
as is speech. 

Realize that you are part of a great, orderly, and mutually 
helpful cosmos, that you are not stranded or isolated in a foreign 
universe, but that you are part of it and closely akin to it; and 
your sense of sympathy will be enlarged, your power of free 
communication will be opened, and the heartfelt aspiration and 
communion and petition that we call prayer will come as easily 
and as naturally as converse with those human friends and rela- 
tions whose visible bodily presence gladdens and enriches your 
present life. 

VI 

SUMMARY 

The atmosphere of religion should be recognized as envelop- 
ing and permeating everything; it should not be specially or 
exclusively sought as an emanation from signs and wonders. 
Strange and ultranormal things may happen, and are well 
worthy of study, but they are not to be regarded as especially 
holy. Some of them may represent either extension or survival 
of human faculty, while others may be an inevitable endowment 
or attribute of a sufficiently lofty character; but none of them 
can be accepted without investigation. Testimony concerning 
such things is to be treated in a sceptical and yet open-minded 
spirit ; the results of theory and experiment are to be utilized, as 
in any other branch of natural knowledge; and indiscriminate 
dogmatic rejection is as inappropriate as wholesale uncritical 
acceptance. 

The bearing on the hopes and fears of humanity of such un- 
usual facts as can be verified may be considerable, but they bear 
no exceptional witness to guidance and control. Guidance and 
control, if admitted at all, must be regarded as constant and con- 
tinuous; and it is just this uniform character that makes them 
so difficult to recognize. It is always difficult to perceive or 
apprehend anything which is perfectly regular and continuous. 

Ill [ 14 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

Those fish, for instance, which are submerged in ocean-depths, 
beyond the reach of waves and tides, are probably utterly un- 
conscious of the existence of water; and, however intelligent, 
they can have but Httle reason to beheve in that medium, not- 
withstanding that their whole being, life, and motion, is de- 
pendent upon it from instant to instant. The motion of the 
earth, again, furious rush though it is — fifty times faster than a 
cannon ball — is quite inappreciable to our senses; it has to be 
inferred from celestial observations, and it was strenuously dis- 
beheved by the agnostics of an earher day. 

Uniformity is always difficult to grasp; our senses are not 
made for it, and yet it is characteristic of everything that is most 
efficient; jerks and jolts are easy to appreciate, but they do not 
conduce to progress. Steady motion is what conveys us on our 
way, collisions are but a retarcHng influence. The seeker after 
miracle, in the exceptional and narrow or exclusive sense, is 
pining for a catastrophe ; the investigator of miracle, in the con- 
tinuous and broad or comprehensive sense, has the universe for 
a laboratory. / 



"RELIGION AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE" 

BY THE 

DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND 

Of all the changes which have taken place in the attitude of 
thoughtful men in the course of the last thirty or forty years none 
are more striking than those affecting the relations between 
religion and physical science. The keen controversies which 
formerly raged between the two schools of thought, and the 
bitterness thereby engendered, have become things of the past, 
and the mutual distrust which certainly exercised a baneful in- 
fluence upon both parties has been greatly diminished, if it has 
not altogether disappeared. To what is this great change due ? 
Is it owing to lukewarmness, and to the indifference of either 

III [15] 



THE^ELIEFS 

of the combatants to their own pursuits and doctrines ? Is it 
because the faith of either in their own theories has been under- 
mined ? Has victory declared itself so pali)ably on one side that 
the other is vanquished, and silenced, if not convinced? Or 
does each disputant take a saner and more appreciative view of 
his own position and sphere, and that of his opponent, being con- 
tent to perform his own work without burdening himself with 
criticism of the other ? 

These are very grave and vital questions for all those who are 
strongly impressed with the importance of cither of these great 
branches of human thought and effort, and however little we may 
be able to appreciate in our own day their full significance there 
can be little doubt that on the answer to them must depend the 
legitimacy of our hopes for the advance and improvement of the 
highest interests of mankind. 

It is this, among many other things, which invests with pecul- 
iar importance the able address delivered by the president of the 
British Association at a recent meeting at Belfast. The distin- 
guished services which the protracted and indefatigable labors of 
Professor Dcwar have rendered to science, and the advances 
which it has made under his guidance, together with his well- 
known tolerance of opinion and width of grasp, attach the ut- 
most weight and authority to any views he may express. Con- 
sequently it is very noteworthy that he should on that occasion 
have called attention in a marked manner to what he fitly de- 
scribes as the "epoch-making deliverance" of Prof essor Tyndall 
in the same city some thirty years ago, and should have dwelt 
with special emphasis on his declaration on behalf of men of 
science that "we claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the 
entire domain of cosmological theory." Professor Dcwar adds 
that this " claim has been practically, though often unconsciously, 
conceded." In other words, if I understand the Professor 
rightly, the somewhat militant dictum of Tyndall has been 
justified by the defeat of the theologian, and his abandonment 
since the year 1874 of a field he has been compelled to admit he 
had no right to occupy. This must be a somewhat startling 
assertion for some persons who, while sincerely interested in the 
results of scientific research, and profoundly sensible of the value 

m [16] 



THE BELIEFS 

of the studies of those gifted men who devote themselves to it, are 
nevertheless firmly attached to the current theology of the day, 
and are absolutely unaware of having resigned an inch of its 
territory. 

It is, therefore, justifiable, and, indeed, necessary, to exam- 
ine this declaration of Tyndall's a httle closely, and to ascertain 
exactly what it means before inquiring whether its prog- 
nostics have been actually fulfilled. But as it is always haz- 
ardous to criticise any single sentence of an utterance without 
giving its context it may be well to quote the whole passage. 

"The impregnable position of science may be described in a 
few words. We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the 
entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems 
which thus infringe upon the domain of science must, in so jar 
as Ihey do this, submit to its control, and relinquish all thought of 
controlHng it. Acting otherwise proved disastrous in the past, 
and is simply fatuous to-day. Every system which would escape 
the fate of an organism too rigid to adjust itself to its environ- 
ment, must be plastic to the extent that the growth of knowledge 
demands."* 

Now let us revert to the sentence of the above which is quoted 
by Professor Dcwar, and is indeed the text of that part of his 
address: "We claim, and we shall wrest, from theology the en- 
tire domain of cosmological theory." 

"Theology" is the science which treats of the nature, attri- 
butes, and modes of working of the Deity; "cosmology" is the 
science which deals with the origin, qualities, and properties, 
active or passive, of the material world; a "domain" is either the 
lordship over a territory, or the territory under rule. And, put 
into less figurative and formal language, these words mean that 
the science which treats of the nature, attributes, and modes of 
the working of Deity has nothing to tell us of the origin, quali- 
ties, and properties of the material world, can throw no light 
upon them, and is, therefore, not worth listening to on the 
point. 

Now one of three things must be true. Either there is no 
Deity, in which case there can be no science about Him, and it is 
* See Forty-fourth Report of the British Association (1874), p. xcv. 
Ill [17] 



THE BELIEFS 

impossible to wrest anything from that which has no existence; 
or there is a Deity, but we can know nothing about Him, in 
which case there can equally be no science of theology; or, 
thirdly, there is at any rate a Great First Cause, who has re- 
vealed Himself to some extent to man, and of whose attributes, 
etc., man can thus form some idea. If this last be the true state 
of the case (and we may gather from Tyndall's address that this 
was the direction in which his own convictions pointed), surely 
every scientist must regard the material universe as one of the 
most striking revelations of its supreme author which He has 
afforded. 

And thus we are brought to this signification of Tyndall's 
dictum, viz., that the students of cosmology claim that the most 
striking revelation of Himself which God has given to man is no 
part of that science which deals with His nature and attributes. 
This seems hardly a scientific or logical position. Theology may 
or may not have grappled satisfactorily with the problems. She 
may need direction and hmitation, but she can be no more dis- 
possessed by physical science than the starry heavens can be 
shut to Galileo by the Index Expurgatorius. 

An analogous, though not an identical, relation to that 
between theology and physical science may be traced between 
history and archaeology. For many ages history held its own 
almost, if not entirely, unaided by the researches and discoveries 
of the archaeologist. History so isolated not infrequently drew 
unwarranted conclusions, not so much on her theoretical and 
aesthetic side (for the philosophy of history and politics has ad- 
vanced but slowly) as in her facts, and especially in their details. 
And she left, and, for the matter of that, still leaves, much un- 
accounted for and unexplained. Archaeology, dealing with the 
material part, the dry bones, of the subject, has corrected some 
of her conclusions. But what would be thought of an attempt to 
wrest from history the whole domain of archaeology for this 
reason? How great would have been the loss if Layard and 
Fhnders Petrie, Sayce and Evans had turned Herodotus out of 
court ! For many years the most suggestive pages of the Father 
of History have seemed as idle tales ; and those too impatient to 
tolerate an apparent paradox, or to wait for a solution of a 

III [ i8 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

startling statement, dubbed him the father of lies. But wider 
knowledge has largely vindicated the Greek, and the process is 
still going on. It is, for instance, only quite recently that the 
excavations in Crete have verified the accuracy of the stories of 
Minos, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur. 

And just as the day. is dawning when not only is archaeology 
corroborating history, but history is, in innumerable cases, inter- 
preting and vivifying antiquarian discoveries in a very unex- 
pected manner, so there are many persons who are quite willing 
to bide in patience for the time when theology will illuminate 
many a scientific problem, and when science shall throw an un- 
looked-for light on theology. 

The truth is that there are two classes of minds, each of 
which finds it extremely difificult, not merely to sympathize with, 
but to conceive the attitude of the other. The one is slow to 
believe anything the truth of which has not been either proved 
experimentally or logically shown to be probable. The other 
experiences no difiiculty in saying "credo quia impossibile," and 
indeed regards such an attitude in the finite postulated' by the 
existence of the infinite. For both these modes of thought there 
can be for many people no common and simultaneous acceptance. 
But it does not necessarily follow that either should attack the 
other. In the Middle Ages, the theologian assaulted the scien- 
tist with great success, having the "bayonets" on his side. 
Thirty years ago the tables were turned, and the scientist's on- 
slaught on the theologian is expressed by Tyndall in a tone as 
decided as that of Urban the Eighth. Each wished to " wrest the 
domain of cosmological theory" from the other, and neither had 
the smallest right to do anything of the sort ! 

Another great obstacle to a common understanding is a 
verbal one. All men's thoughts are better than their words. 
Every one knows what it is to have ideas passing through the 
mind which the language at the thinker's command is totally in- 
adequate to express. In the case of an exact science, this diffi- 
culty is in some degree met by the coining of new words, a prac- 
tice so prevalent in the present day as to have lately called forth 
a vigorous protest in some quarters. But theology is not an 
exact science, and its subject-matter is to a large extent in- 
III [ 19 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

capable of precise definition, as the history of all sects and 
heresies abundantly shows. Words are commonly used in a 
vague and general sense, and this vagueness is intolerable to 
minds trained in the schools of experimental research. 

The true eirenicon consists in the frank recognition of these 
facts, and of the right of either party to traverse the whole do- 
main of human thought without an indictment of trespass, each 
retaining its own opinion of the abihty of the other to discover 
and develop the resources of that domain, but without inter- 
ference with its proceedings. If this were fully recognized, 
science would at any rate be the gainer by her liberty to attract 
an audience from among those who, being much affected by 
theological and ecclesiastical influences, are scared by a militant 
attitude on the part of the scientist. 

There is perhaps no better example of the character and 
value of such a position than the bearing which it would have on 
the acceptance of the great doctrine of evolution. As a working 
hypothesis which affords from the purely material side of the 
question a probable explanation of a vast body of fact, and which 
furnishes an admirable basis for the coordination and classifica- 
tion of cosmical phenomena, it receives the adhesion of almost 
every one at all quahfied to form an opinion. And this is all that 
science need, or indeed does, demand for her most brilliant 
generalizations. Let us hear Professor Dewar's finely ex- 
pressed statement of her posture. 

. "It is only poverty of language," he says, "and the necessity 
of compendious expression, that oblige the man of science to 
resort to metaphor, and to speak of the laws of Nature. In 
reality, he does not pretend to formulate any laws for Nature, 
since to do so would be to assume a knowledge of the inscrutable 
cause from which alone such laws could emanate. When he 
speaks of a 'law of Nature' he simply indicates a sequence of 
events which, so far as his experience goes, is invariable, and 
which therefore enables him to predict, to a certain extent, what 
will happen in given circumstances. But however seemingly 
bold may be the speculation in which he permits himself to in- 
dulge, he does not claim for his best hypothesis more than a pro- 
visional validity. He does not forget that to-morrow may bring 

III [ 20 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

a new experience compelling him to recast the hypothesis of to- 
day. This plasticity of scientific thought, depending on rev- 
erent recognition of the vastness of the unknown, is oddly made a 
matter of reproach by the very people who harp upon the limita- 
tions of human knowledge." 

But the theologian approaches the matter from another 
standpoint. He is accustomed to resolve problems according to 
what he considers to be their absolute and abstract truth or 
falsehood, and he asks, not whether "so far as experience goes " 
the theory of evolution holds good, but whether it is in fact the 
true explanation of the material world as we see it, and how far 
it is so. Is it not evident that science cannot, and does not pro- 
fess to, give an answer? But two things are plain. That en- 
vironment does modify the type of living organisms cannot be 
denied by any one. That all such organisms have been evolved 
from one primordial form cannot be affirmed with any certainty. 

Between these two extremes lies an ocean of possibilities. 
Each man will adopt his position partly according to the char- 
acter of his own mind, partly according to the value he attaches 
to abstract doctrines, partly according to his capacity for collect- 
ing evidence and for weighing it fairly. Why should he not hold 
it without insisting that his neighbor should assume it also? 
Why should not the man who cannot accept the Darwinian 
doctrine as the real explanation of the problems it claims to 
solve, entertain it as a working hypothesis? Why should the 
Darwinian wrest the domain of cosmological theory from him, 
when he himself can claim nothing more for his best hypothesis 
about the cosmos than provisional validity ? 

Professor Dewar asserts that science adopts a humble and a 
reverent attitude. He confesses on her behalf her ''ignorance of 
the ultimate nature of matter, of the ultimate nature of energy, 
and still more of the origin and ultimate synthesis of the two." 
Nay, further, he regards the mystery of matter as inscrutable. 
One of the greatest theologians who ever existed asserted an 
equal humility for theology more than 1800 years ago, when he 
declared that he saw through a glass darkly, and knew only in 
part. Whether the theologian and the natural philosopher will 
ever see perfectly eye to eye until both stand face to face with 
III [ 21 ] 



THE BELIEFS 

Him whose actings they ahke study, and know even as they are 
known, may well be doubted. But every true advance achieved 
by either must necessarily tend to bring them to the same goal, 
however temporarily divergent the winding and intricate paths 
leading thereto may appear to be. Theology, no less than 
natural science (to quote after Professor Dewar the noble words 
of Lord Kelvin), is "bound by the everlasting law of honor to 
face fearlessly every problem that can fairly be presented to it," 
and to assert its right to range over every domain of theory with 
absolute freedom. It is not by elbowing out her sister that 
either will promote her own true interests, but by patient and 
tolerant occupation and development of a field amply sufficient 
for both to seek to advance side by side from one conquest to 
another till both shall join hands in the full enlightenment of 
the perfect day. 



Ill [ 22 ] 



IV 



THE SUCCESSES 

FIVE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO 
CIVILIZATION" 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



ZpROM the probletns which menace the future, we turn for 
encouragement to the successes already achieved. As 
President Eliot himself expresses it, ^^Our country^ s future perils, 
whether visible or still unimagined, are to be met with courage and 
constancy founded p,rmly on these popular achievements of the 
pasty How great these achievements have really been, he makes 
clear to us in the following address, which was first delivered 
before the Chautauqua educational conference and is here presented 
with the approval of President Eliot and by the courtesy of his 
publishers, the Century Company. The address is patriotic, as 
we all are patriotic, but it is wholly free from any extravagance of 
praise or pride. It uses nouns, not adjectives, states facts with- 
out attempting to color them. It is thoughtful, moderate, and 
conservative. 

There was a time when America passed through an era of 
giant adjectives, of self-congratulation, self -consciousness, perhaps 
of boast fulness. Recently, however, as if in reaction against this 
excess, many of our citizens have swung to the other extreme. We 
have criticised our country, and decried ourselves; we have mag- 
nified every fault. Perhaps we have been more pessimistic of 
tongue than of heart; yet the fact remains that our country has 
been deliberately underrated by those who love it best. It is well 
* Copyright 1897 by the Century Co. 
IV [ I ] 



TH^UCCESSES 

then that a man who has the confidence oj us all, a man serene and 
aged, the dean 0} American education, for thirty-eight years the 
president oj our largest university, should speak out before us all, 
soberly estimate our past, and tell us what he accepts, what pos- 
terity will undoubtedly accept, as to the worthiness 0} the work so 
jar accomplished by our United States. 

Looking back over forty centuries of history, we observe that 
many nations have made characteristic contributions to the prog- 
ress of civihzation, the beneficent effects of which have been 
permanent, akhough the races that made them may have lost 
their national form and organization, or their relative standing 
among the nations of the earth. Thus, the Hebrew race, dur- 
ing many centuries, made supreme contributions to religious 
thought; and the Greek, during the brief chmax of the race, to 
speculative philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and the drama. 
The Roman people developed mihtary colonization, aqueducts, 
roads and bridges, and a great body of public law, large parts 
of which still survive ; and the Italians of the middle ages and the 
Renaissance developed ecclesiastical organization and the fine 
arts, as tributary to the splendor of the church and to municipal 
luxury. England, for several centuries, has contributed to the 
institutional development of representative government and 
public justice; the Dutch, in the sixteenth century, made a 
superb struggle for free thought and free government; France, 
in the eighteenth century, taught the doctrine of individual free- 
dom and the theory of human rights; and Germany, at two 
periods within the nineteenth century, fifty years apart, proved 
the vital force of the sentiment of nationality. I ask you to con- 
sider with me what characteristic and durable contributions the 
American people have been making to the progress of civilization. 

The first and principal contribution to which I shall ask your 
attention is the advance made in the United States, not in theory 
only, but in practice, toward the abandonment of war as the 
means of settling disputes between nations, the substitution of 
discussion and arbitration, and the avoidance of armaments. 
If the intermittent Indian fighting and the brief contest with 
the Barbary corsairs be disregarded, the United States passed 
IV [ 2 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

through only four years and a quarter of international war in the 
one hundred and seven years following the adoption of the Con- 
stitution. Within the same period the United States have been a 
party to forty-seven arbitrations — being more than half of all 
that have taken place in the modern world. The questions 
settled by these arbitrations have been just such as have com- 
monly caused wars, namely, questions of boundary, fisheries, 
damage caused by war or civil disturbances, and injuries to 
commerce. Some of them were of great magnitude, the four 
made under the treaty of Washington (May 8, 1871) being the 
most important that have ever taken place. Confident in their 
strength, and relying on their ability to adjust international 
differences, the United States have habitually maintained, by 
voluntary enlistment for short terms, a standing army and a 
fleet which, in proportion to the population, are insignificant. 

The beneficent effects of this American contribution to civili- 
zation are of two sorts : in the first place, the direct evils of war 
and of preparations for war have been diminished ; and secondly, 
the influence of the war spirit on the perennial conflict between 
the rights of the single personal unit and the powers of the multi- 
tude that constitute organized society — or, in other words, 
between individual freedom and collective authority — has been 
reduced to the lowest terms. War has been, and still is, the 
school of collectivism, the warrant of tyranny. Century after 
centuiy, tribes, clans, and nations have sacrificed the liberty 
of the individual to the fundamental necessity of being strong for 
combined defence or attack in war. Individual freedom is 
crushed in war, for the nature of war is inevitably despotic. It 
says to the private person : " Obey without a question, even unto 
death; die in this ditch, without knowing why; walk into that 
deadly thicket; mount this embankment, behind which are men 
who will try to kill you, lest you should kill them; make part of 
an immense machine for bhnd destruction, cruelty, rapine, and 
kilHng." At this moment every young man in Continental 
Europe learns the lesson of absolute military obedience, and 
feels himself subject to this crushing power of militant society, 
against which no rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness avail anything. This pernicious influence, 

IV [3] 



THE-SUCCESSES 



inherent in the social organization of all Continental Europe 
during many centuries, the American people have for genera- 
tions escaped, and they show other nations how to escape it. I 
ask your attention to the favorable conditions under which this 
contribution of the United States to civilization has been made. 

There has been a deal of fighting on the American con- 
tinent during the past three centuries; but it has not been of the 
sort which most imperils liberty. The first European colonists 
who occupied portions of the coast of North America encoun- 
tered in the Indians men of the Stone Age, who ultimately had to 
be resisted and quelled by force. The Indian races were at a 
stage of development thousands of years behind that of the 
Europeans. They could not be assimilated ; for the most part 
they could not be taught or even reasoned with ; with a few ex- 
ceptions they had to be driven away by prolonged fighting, or 
subdued by force so that they would live peaceably with the 
whites. This warfare, however, always had in it for the whites 
a large element of self-defence — the homes and families of the 
settlers were to be defended against a stealthy and pitiless foe. 
Constant exposure to the attacks of savages was only one of the 
formidable dangers and difficulties which for a hundred years 
the early settlers had to meet, and which developed in them 
courage, hardiness, and persistence. The French and English 
wars on the North American continent, always more or less 
mixed with Indian warfare, were characterized by race hatred 
and religious animosity — two of the commonest causes of war in 
all ages ; but they did not tend to fasten upon the English colo- 
nists any objectionable public authority, or to contract the limits 
of individual liberty. They furnished a school of martial quali- 
ties at small cost to liberty. In the War of Independence there 
was a distinct hope and purpose to enlarge individual liberty. 
It made possible a confederation of the colonies, and, ultimately, 
the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. It gave 
to the thirteen colonies a lesson in collectivism, but it was a 
needed lesson on the necessity of combining their forces to resist 
an oppressive external authority. The war of 1812 is properly 
called the Second War of Independence, for it was truly a fight 
for liberty and for the rights of neutrals, in resistance to the im- 

IV [4] 



THE SUCCESSES 

pressment of seamen and other oppressions growing out of 
European conflicts. The civil war of 1861-65 was waged, on the 
side of the North, primarily, to prevent the dismemberment of 
the country, and, secondarily and incidentally, to destroy the in- 
stitution of slavery. On the Northern side it therefore called 
forth a generous element of popular ardor in defence of free 
institutions; and though it temporarily caused centralization of 
great powers in the government, it did as much to promote in- 
dividual freedom as it did to strengthen pulolic authority. 

In all this series of fightings the main motives were self- 
defence, resistance to oppression, the enlargement of liberty, and 
the conservation of national acquisitions. The war v/ith Mexico, 
it is true, was of a wholly different type. That was a war of 
conquest, and of conquest chiefly in the interest of African 
slavery. It was also an unjust attack made by a powerful people 
on a feeble one ; but it lasted less than two years, and the number 
of men engaged in it was at no time large. Moreover, by the 
treaty which ended the war, the conquering nation agreed to pay 
the conquered eighteen million dollars in partial compensation 
for some of the territory wrested from it, instead of demanding a 
huge war-indemnity, as the European way is. Its results con- 
tradicted the anticipations both of those who advocated and of 
those who opposed it. It was one of the wrongs which prepared 
the way for the great rebellion; but its direct evils were of 
moderate extent, and it had no effect on the perennial conflict 
between individual liberty and public power. 

In the mean time, partly as the results of Indian fighting and 
the Mexican war, but chiefly through purchases and arbitrations, 
the American people had acquired a territory so extensive, so 
defended by oceans, gulfs, and great lakes, and so intersected by 
those great natural highways, navigable rivers, that it would ob- 
viously be impossible for any enemy to overrun or subdue it. 
The civilized nations of Europe, western Asia, and northern 
Africa have always been liable to hostile incursions from without. 
Over and over again barbarous hordes have overthrown estab- 
lished civilizations ; and at this moment there is not a nation of 
Europe which does not feel obliged to maintain monstrous arma- 
ments for defence against its neighbors. The American people 

IV [5] 



THE SUCCESSES 

have long been exempt from such terrors, and are now absolutely 
free from this necessity of keeping in readiness to meet hesL\y 
assaults. The absence of a great standing army and of a large 
fleet has been a main characteristic of the United States, in con- 
trast with the other civilized nations; this has been a great in- 
ducement to immigration, and a prime cause of the country's 
rapid increase in wealth. The United States have no formi- 
dable neighbor, except Great Britain in Canada. In April, 1817, 
by a convention made between Great Britain and the United 
States, without much pubhc discussion or observation, these two 
powerful nations agreed that each should keep on the Great 
Lakes only a few police vessels of insignificant size and arma- 
ment. This agreement was made but four years after Perry's 
naval victory on Lake Erie, and only three years after the burn- 
ing of Washington by a British force. It was one of the first 
acts of Monroe's first administration, and it would be difhcult to 
find in all history a more judicious or effectual agreement be- 
tween two powerful neighbors. For eighty years this beneficent 
convention has helped to keep the peace. The European way 
would have been to build competitive fleets, dockyards, and 
fortresses, all of which would have helped to bring on war during 
the periods of mutual exasperation which have occurred since 
1817. Monroe's second administration was signalized, six 
years later, by the declaration that the United States would con- 
sider any attempt on the part of the Holy Alliance to extend 
their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to 
the peace and safety of the United States. This announce- 
ment was designed to prevent the introduction on the American 
continent of the horrible European system — with its balance of 
power, its alhances offensive and defensive in opposing groups, 
and its perpetual armaments on an enormous scale. That a 
declaration expressly intended to promote peace and prevent 
armaments should now be perverted into an argument for arming 
and for a belligerent public policy is an extraordinary perversion 
of the true American doctrine. 

The ordinary causes of war between nation and nation have 
been lacking in America for the last century and a quarter. 
How many wars in the world's history have been due to contend- 
IV [6] 



THE SUCCESSES 

ing dynasties; how many of the most cruel and protracted wars 
have been due to religious strife ; how many to race hatred ! No 
one of these causes of war has been efficacious in America since 
the French were overcome in Canada by the English in 1759. 
Looking forward into the future, we find it impossible to imagine 
circumstances under which any of these common causes of war 
can take effect on the North American continent. Therefore, 
the ordinary motives for maintaining armaments in time of 
peace, and concentrating the powers of government in such away 
as to interfere with individual liberty, have not been in play in 
the United States, as among the nations of Europe, and are not 
likely to be. 

Such have been the favorable conditions under which 
America has made its best contribution to the progress of our 
race. 

There are some people of a perverted sentimentality who 
occasionally lament the absence in our country of the ordinary 
inducements to war, on the ground that war develops certain 
noble qualities in some of the combatants, and gives opportunity 
for the practice of heroic virtues, such as courage, loyalty, and 
self-sacrifice. It is further said that prolonged peace makes 
nations effeminate, luxurious, and materialistic, and substitutes 
for the high ideals of the patriot soldier the low ideals of the 
farmer, manufacturer, tradesman, and pleasure-seeker. This 
view seems to me to err in two opposite ways. In the first place, 
it forgets that war, in spite of the fact that it develops some 
splendid virtues, is the most horrible occupation that human 
beings can possibly engage in. It is cruel, treacherous, and 
murderous. Defensive warfare, particularly on the part of a 
weak nation against powerful invaders or oppressors, excites a 
generous sympathy ; but for every heroic defence there must be 
an attack by a preponderating force, and war, being the conflict 
of the two, must be judged by its moral effects, not on one 
party, but on both parties. Moreover, the weaker party may 
have the worse cause. The immediate ill effects of war are 
bad enough, but its after effects are generally worse, because 
indefinitely prolonged and indefinitely wasting and damaging. 
At this moment, thirty-one years after the end of our civil war, 
IV [7] 



THE SUCCESSES 

there are two great evils afflicting our country which took their 
rise in that war, namely, (i) the belief of a large proportion of 
our people in money without intrinsic value, or worth less than 
its face, and made current solely by act of Congress, and (2) the 
payment of immense annual sums in pensions. It is the paper- 
money delusion born of the civil Vvar which generated and sup- 
ports the silver-money delusion of to-day. As a consequence of 
the war, the nation has paid $2,000,000,000 in pensions within 
thirty-three years. So far as pensions are paid to disabled 
persons, they are a just and inevitable, but unproductive, ex- 
penditure; so far as they are paid to persons who are not dis- 
abled — men or women — they are in the main not only unproduc- 
tive, but demoralizing; so far as they promote the marriage of 
young women to old men, as a pecuniary speculation, they create 
a grave social evil. It is impossible to compute or even imagine 
the losses and injuries already inflicted by the fiat-money delu- 
sion ; and we know that some of the worst evils of the pension 
system v/ill go on for a hundred years to come unless the laws 
about widows' pensions are changed for the better. It is a 
significant fact that in 1895, of the existing pensioners of the war 
of 18 1 2 only twenty-one were surviving soldiers or sailors, while 
3,826 were widows. 

War gratifies, or used to gratify, the combative instinct of 
mankind, but it gratifies also the love of plunder, destruction, 
cruel discipline, and arbitrary' power. It is doubtful whether 
fighting with modern appliances will continue to gratify the 
savage instinct of combat; for it is not likely that in the future 
two opposing lines of men can ever meet, or any line or column 
reach an enemy's intrenchments. The machine-gun can only 
be compared to the scythe, which cuts off every blade of grass 
within its sweep. It has made cavalry charges impossible, just 
as the modern ironclad has made impossible the manoeuvres of 
one of Nelson's fleets. On land, the only mode of approach of 
one line to another must hereafter be by concealment, crawling, 
or surprise. Naval actions will henceforth be conflicts between 
opposing machines, guided, to be sure, by men; but it will be the 
best machine that wins, and not necessarily the most enduring 
men. War will become a contest between treasuries or war- 

IV [8] 



THE SUCCESSES 

chests ; for now that 10,000 men can fire away a million dollars' 
worth of ammunition in an hour, no poor nation can long resist a 
rich one, unless there be some extraordinary difference between 
the two in mental and moral strength. 

The view that war is desirable omits also the consideration 
that modern social and industrial life affords ample opportuni- 
ties for the courageous and loyal discharge of duty, apart from 
the barbarities of warfare. There are many serviceable occupa- 
tions in civil life which call for all the courage and fidelity of the 
best soldier, and for more than his independent responsibility, 
because not pursued in masses or under the immediate command 
of superiors. Such occupations are those of the locomotive 
engineer, the electric lineman, the railroad brakcman, the city 
fireman, and the policeman. The occupation of the locomotive 
engineer requires constantly a high degree of skill, alertness, 
fidelity, and resolution, and at any moment may call for heroic 
self-forgetfulness. The occupation of a lineman requires all the 
courage and endurance of a soldier, whose lurking foe is mys- 
terious and invisible. In the two years 1893 and 1894 there 
were 34,000 trainmen killed and wounded on the railroads of the 
United States, and 25,000 other railroad employes besides. I 
need not enlarge on the dangers of the fireman's occupation, or 
on the discipHned gallantry with which its risks are habitually 
incurred. The policeman in large cities needs every virtue of 
the best soldier, for in the discharge of many of his most im- 
portant duties he is alone. Even the feminine occupation of the 
trained nurse illustrates every heroic quality which can possibly 
be exhibited in war; for she, simply in the way of duty, without 
the stimulus of excitement or companionship, runs risks from 
which many a soldier in hot blood would shrink. No one need 
be anxious about the lack of opportunities in civilized life for the 
display of heroic qualities. New industries demand new forms 
of fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion. Every generation de- 
velops some new kind of hero. Did it ever occur to you that the 
"scab" is a creditable type of nineteenth-century hero ? In de- 
fence of his rights as an individual, he deliberately incurs the 
reprobation of many of his fellows, and runs the immediate risk 
of bodily injury or even of death. He also risks his liveli- 

IV [9] 



THE SUflCESSES 

hood for the future, and thereby the well-being of his family. 
He steadily asserts in action his right to work on such conditions 
as he sees fit to make, and, in so doing, he exhibits remarkable 
courage and renders a great service to his fellow-men. He is 
generally a quiet, unpretending, silent person, who values his 
personal freedom more than the society and approbation of his 
mates. Often he is impelled to work by family affection, but 
this fact does not diminish his heroism. There are file-closers 
behind the line of battle of the bravest regiment. Another 
modern personage who needs heroic endurance, and often ex- 
hibits it, is the public servant who steadily does his duty against 
the outcry of a party press bent on perverting his every word and 
act. Through the telegram, cheap postage, and the daily news- 
paper, the forces of hasty pubhc opinion can now be concen- 
trated and expressed with a rapidity and intensity unknown 
to preceding generations. In consequence, the independent 
thinker or actor, or the public servant, when his thoughts or acts 
run counter to prevaihng popular or party opinions, encounters 
sudden and intense obloc^uy, which, to many temperaments, is 
very formidable. That habit of submitting to the opinion of the 
majority which democracy fosters renders the storm of detrac- 
tion and calumny all the more difficult to endure — makes it, in- 
deed, so intolerable to many citizens that they will conceal or 
modify their opinions rather than endure it. Yet the very 
breath of life for a democracy is free discussion, and the taking 
account, of all opinions honestly held and reasonably expressed. 
The unreality of the vilification of public men in the modern 
press is often rc\-ealed by the sudden change when an eminent 
public servant retires or dies. A man for whom no words of 
derision or condemnation were strong enough yesterday is 
recognized to-morrow as an honorable and serviceable person, 
and a credit to his country. Nevertheless, this habit of partisan 
ridicule and denunciation in the daily reading-matter of millions 
of people calls for a new kind of courage and toughness in public 
men, and calls for it, not in brief moments of excitement only, 
but steadily, year in and year out. Clearly, there is no need of 
bringing on wars in order to breed heroes. Civilized life affords 
plenty of opportunities for heroes, and for a better kind than v/ar 

IV [ lo ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

or any other savagery has ever produced. Moreover, none but 
lunatics would set a city on fire in order to give opportunities for 
fceroism to firemen, or introduce the cholera or yellow fever to 
give physicians and nurses opportunity for practising disin- 
terested devotion, or condemn thousands of people to extreme 
poverty in order that some well-to-do persons might practise a 
beautiful charity. It is equally crazy to advocate war on the 
ground that it is a school for heroes. 

Another misleading argument for war needs brief notice. It 
is said that war is a school of national development — that a 
nation, when conducting a great war, puts forth prodigious exer- 
tions to raise money, supply munitions, enhst troops, and keep 
them in the field, and often gets a clearer conception and a better 
control of its own materials and moral forces while making these 
unusual exertions. The nation which means to live in peace 
necessarily foregoes, it is said, these valuable opportunities of 
abnormal activity. Naturally, such a nation's abnormal ac- 
tivities devoted to destruction would be diminished; but its 
normal and abnormal activities devoted to construction and im- 
provement ought to increase. 

One great reason for the rapid development of the United 
States since the adoption of the Constitution is the comparative 
exemption of the whole people from war, dread of war, and 
preparations for war. The energies of the people have been 
directed into other channels. The progress of applied science 
during the present century, and the new ideals concerning the 
well-being of human multitudes, have opened great fields for the 
useful application of national energy. This immense territory 
of ours, stretching from ocean to ocean, and for the most part but 
imperfectly developed and sparsely settled, affords a broad field 
for the beneficent application of the richest national forces 
during an indefinite period. There is no department of national 
activity in which we could not advantageously put forth much 
more force than we now expend ; and there are great fields which 
we have never cultivated at all. As examples, I may mention 
the post-office, national sanitation, public works, and education. 
Although great improvements have been made during the past 
fifty years in the collection and delivery of mail matter, much 

IV [ii] 



THE SUCCESSES 

still remains to be done both in city and country, and particu- 
larly in the country. In the mail facilities secured to our people 
we are far behind several European governments, whereas we 
ought to be far in advance of every European government except 
Switzerland, since the rapid interchange of ideas, and the pro- 
motion of family, friendly, and commercial intercourse are of 
more importance to a democracy than to any other form of 
political society. Our national government takes very little 
pains about the sanitation of the country, or its deliverance from 
injurious insects and parasites; yet these are matters of gravest 
interest, with which only the general government can deal, 
because action by separate States or cities is necessarily ineffect- 
ual. To fight pestilences needs quite as much energy, skill, and 
courage as to carry on war; indeed, the foes are more insidious 
and awful, and the means of resistance less obvious. On the av- 
erage and the large scale, the professions which heal and prevent 
disease, and mitigate suffering, call for much more ability, con- 
stancy, and devotion than the professions which inflict wounds 
and death and all sorts of human miser}^ Our government has 
never touched the important subject of national roads, by which 
I mean not railroads, but common highways; yet here is a great 
subject for beneficent action through government, in which we 
need only go for our lessons to little republican Switzerland. 
Inundations and droughts are great enemies of the human race, 
against which government ought to create defences, because 
private enterprise cannot cope with such wide-spreading evils. 
Popular education is another great field in which public activity 
should be indefinitely enlarged, not so much through the action 
of the Federal government — though even there a much more 
effective supervision should be provided than now exists — but 
through the action of States, cities, and towns. We have hardly 
begun to apprehend the fundamental necessity and infinite 
value of public education, or to appreciate the immense ad- 
vantages to be derived from additional expenditure for it. What 
prodigious possibilities of improvement are suggested by the 
single statement that the average annual expenditure for the 
schooling of a child in the United States is only about eighteen 
dollars! Here is a cause which requires from hundreds of 

IV [ 12 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

thousands of men and women keen intelligence, hearty devotion 
to duty, and a steady uplifting and advancement of all its stand- 
ards and ideals. The system of public instruction should em- 
body for coming generations all the virtues of the mediaeval 
church. It should stand for the brotherhood and unity of all 
classes and conditions; it should exalt the joys of the intellectual 
life above all material delights; and it should produce the best 
constituted and most wisely directed intellectual and moral host 
that the world has seen. In view of such unutilized opportuni- 
ties as these for the beneficent application of great public forces, 
does it not seem monstrous that war should be advocated on the 
ground that it gives occasion for rallying and using the national 
energies ? 

The second eminent contribution which the United States 
have made to civilization is their thorough acceptance, in theory 
and practice, of the widest religious toleration. As a means of 
suppressing individual liberty, the collective authority of the 
Church, when elaborately organized in a hierarchy directed by 
one head and absolutely devoted in every rank of its service, 
comes next in proved efficiency to that concentration of powers in 
government which enables it to carry on war effectively. The 
Western Christian Church, organized under the Bishop of Rome, 
acquired, during the middle ages, a centralized authority which 
quite overrode both the temporal ruler and the rising spirit of 
nationality. For a time Christian Church and Christian State 
acted together, just as in Egypt, during many earlier centuries, 
the great powers of civil and religious rule had been united. 
The Crusades marked the climax of the power of the Church. 
Thereafter, Church and State were often in conflict; and during 
this prolonged conflict the seeds of liberty were planted, took 
root, and made some sturdy growth. We can see now, as we 
look back on the history of Europe, how fortunate it was that the 
colonization of North America by Europeans was deferred until 
after the period of the Reformation, and especially until after the 
Elizabethan period in England, the Luther period in Germany, 
and the splendid struggle of the Dutch for liberty in Holland. 
The founders of New England and New York were men who 
had imbibed the principles of resistance both to arbitrary civil 

IV [ 13 ] 



THE ^SUCCESSES 



:^ 



power and to universal ecclesiastical authority. Hence it came 
about that within the territory now covered by the United States 
no single ecclesiastical organization ever obtained a wide and 
oppressive control, and that in different parts of this great region 
churches very unlike in doctrine and organization were almost 
simultaneously established. It has been an inevitable conse- 
quence of this condition of things that the Church, as a whole, in 
the United States has not been an effective opponent of any form 
of human rights. For generations it has been divided into 
numerous sects and denominations, no one of which has been 
able to claim more than a tenth of the population as its ad- 
herents; and the practices of these numerous denominations 
have been profoundly modified by political theories and prac- 
tices, and by social customs natural to new communities formed 
under the prevailing conditions of free intercourse and rapid 
growth. The constitutional prohibition of religious tests as qual- 
ifications for office gave the United States the leadership among 
the nations in dissociating theological opinions and poHtical 
rights. No one denomination or ecclesiastical organization in 
the United States has held great properties, or has had the means 
of conducting its ritual with costly pomp or its charitable works 
with imposing liberality. No splendid architectural exhibitions 
of Church power have interested or overawed the population. 
On the contrary, there has prevailed in general a great sim- 
plicity in public worship, until very recent years. Some splen- 
dors have been lately developed by religious bodies in the great 
cities; but these splendors and luxuries have been almost simul- 
taneously exhibited by religious bodies of very different, not to 
say opposite, kinds. Thus, in New York city, the Jews, the 
Greek Church, the Catholics, and the Episcopalians have all 
erected, or undertaken to erect, magnificent edifices. But these 
recent demonstrations of wealth and zeal are so distributed 
among differing religious organizations that they cannot be 
imagined to indicate a coming centralization of ecclesiastical in- 
fluence adverse to individual liberty. 

In the United States, the great principle of religious tolera- 
tion is better understood and more firmly established than in any 
other nation of the earth. It is not only embodied in legislation, 

IV [ 14 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

but calso completely recognized in the habits and customs of good 
society Elsewhere it may be a long road from legal to social 
recognition of religious liberty, as the example of England shows. 
This recognition alone would mean, to any competent student of 
history, that the United States had made an unexampled con- 
tribution to the reconciliation of just governmental power with just 
freedom for the individual, inasmuch as the partial establishment 
of religious toleration has been the main work of civiliza- 
tion during the past four centuries. In view of this charac- 
teristic and infinitely beneficent contribution to human happi- 
ness and progress, how pitiable seem the temporary outbursts of 
bigotry and fanaticism which have occasionally marred the fair 
record of our country in regard to religious toleration! If any 
one imagines that this American contribution to civilization is no 
longer important— that the victory for toleration has been 
already won— let him recall the fact that the last years of the 
nineteenth century witnessed two horrible religious persecutions, 
one by a Christian nation, the other by a Moslem— one, of the 
Jews by Russia, and the other, of the Armenians by Turkey. 

The third characteristic contribution which the United 
States have made to civilization has been the safe development of 
a manhood suffrage nearly universal. The experience of the 
United States has brought out several principles with regard to 
the suffrage which have not been clearly apprehended by some 
eminent political philosophers. In the first place, American ex- 
perience has demonstrated the advantages of a gradual approach 
to universal suffrage, over a sudden leap. Universal suffrage is 
not the first and only means of attaining democratic government; 
rather, it is the ultimate goal of successful democracy. It is not 
a specific for the cure of all political ills; on the contrary, it may 
itself easily be the source of great political evils. The people of 
the United States feel its dangers to-day. When constituencies 
are large, it aggravates the well-known difficulties of party 
government; so that many of the ills which threaten democratic 
communities at this moment, whether in Europe or America, 
proceed from the breakdown of party government rather than 
from failures of universal suffrage. The methods of party 
government were elaborated where suffrage w^as limited and 

IV [15] 



THE ^XESSES 

constituencies were small. Manhood suffrage has not worked 
perfectly well in the United States, or in any other nation where 
it has been adopted, and it is not likely very soon to work per- 
fectly anywhere. It is like freedom of the will for the individual 
— the only atmosphere in which virtue can grow, but an atmos- 
phere in which sin can also grow. Like freedom of the will, it 
needs to be surrounded with checks and safeguards, particularly 
in the childhood of the nation; but, like freedom of the will, it is 
the supreme good, the goal of perfected democracy. Secondly, 
like freedom of the will, universal suffrage has an educational 
effect, which has been mentioned by many writers, but has sel- 
dom been clearly apprehended or adequately described. This 
educational effect is produced in two ways: In the first place, the 
combination of individual freedom with social mobility, which a 
wide suffrage tends to produce, permits the capable to rise 
through all grades of society, even within a single generation; 
and this freedom to rise is intensely stimulating to personal am- 
bition. Thus every capable American, from youth to age, is 
bent on bettering himself and his condition.. Nothing can be 
more striking than the contrast between the mental condition of 
an average American belonging to the laborious classes, but con- 
scious that he can rise to the top of the social scale, and that of a 
European mechanic, peasant, or tradesman, who knows that he 
cannot rise out of his class, and is content with his hereditary 
classification. The state of mind of the American prompts to 
constant struggle for self-improvement and the acquisition of all 
sorts of property and power. In the second place, it is a direct 
effect of a broad suffrage that the voters become periodically 
interested in the discussion of grave public problems, which carry 
their minds away from the routine of their daily labor and house- 
hold experience out into, larger fields. The instrumentalities of 
this prolonged education have been multiplied and improved 
enormously within the past fifty years. In no field of human 
endeavor have the fruits of the introduction of steam and elec- 
trical power been more striking than in the methods of reaching 
multitudes of people with instructive narratives, expositions, and 
arguments. The multiplication of newspapers, magazines, and 
books is only one of the immense developments in the means of 

IV [ 16 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

reaching the people. The advocates of any public cause now 
have it in their power to provide hundreds of newspapers with 
the same copy, or the same plates, for simultaneous issue. The 
mails provide the means of circulating millions of leaflets and 
pamphlets. The interest in the minds of the people which 
prompts to the reading of these multiplied communications 
comes from the frequently recurring elections. The more diffi- 
cult the intellectual problem presented in any given election, the 
more educative the effect of the discussion. Many modern in- 
dustrial and financial problems are extremely difficult, even for 
highly educated men. As subjects of earnest thought and dis- 
cussion on the farm, and in the work-shop, factory, rolling-mill, 
and mine, they supply a mental training for millions of adults, 
the like of which has never before been seen in the world. 

In these discussions, it is not only the receptive masses that 
are benefited ; the classes that supply the appeals to the masses 
are also benefited in a high degree. There is no better mental 
exercise for the most highly trained man than the effort to ex- 
pound a difficult subject in so clear a way that the untrained man 
can understand it. In a republic in which the final appeal is to 
manhood suffrage, the educated minority of the people is con- 
stantly stimulated to exertion, by the instinct of self-preservation 
as well as by love of country. They see dangers in proposals 
made to universal suffrage, and they must exert themselves to 
ward off those dangers. The position of the educated and well- 
to-do classes is a thoroughly wholesome one in this respect : they \ 
cannot depend for the preservation of their advantages on land- 
owning, hereditar}' privilege, or any legislation not equally ap- 
plicable to the poorest and humblest citizen. They must main- 
tain their superiority by being superior. They cannot live in a 
too safe corner. 

I touch here on a misconception which underlies much of the 
criticism of universal suffrage. It is commonly said that the 
rule of the majority must be the rule of the most ignorant and : 
incapable, the multitude being necessarily uninstructed as to 
taxation, public finance, and foreign relations, and untrained to 
active thought on such difficult subjects. Now, universal suf- 
frage is merely a convention as to where the last appeal shall lie 

IV [17] 






THE SUCCESSES 

for the decision of public questions; and it is the rule of the 
majority only in this sense. The educated classes are undoubt- 
edly a minority; but it is not safe to assume that they monopo- 
lize the good sense of the community. On the contrary, it is 
very clear that native good judgment and good feeling are not 
proportional to education, and that among a multitude of men 
who have only an elementary education a large proportion will 
possess both good judgment and good feeling. Indeed, persons 
who can neither read nor write may possess a large share of both, 
as is constantly seen in regions where the opportunities for edu- 
cation in childhood have been scanty or inaccessible. It is not 
to be supposed that the cultivated classes, under a regime of 
universal suffrage, are not going to try to make their cultivation 
felt in the discussion and disposal of public questions. Any 
result under universal suffrage is a complex effect of the discus- 
sion of the public question in hand by the educated classes in the 
presence of the comparatively uneducated, when a majority of 
both classes taken together is ultimately to settle the question. 
In practice, both classes divide on almost every issue. But, in 
any case, if the educated classes cannot hold their own with the 
uneducated, by means of their superior physical, mental, and 
moral qualities, they are obviously unfit to lead society. With 
education should come better powers of argument and per- 
suasion, a stricter sense of honor, and a greater general effective- 
ness. With these advantages, the educated classes must un- 
doubtedly appeal to the less educated, and try to convert them 
to their way of thinking; but this is a process which is good for 
both sets of people. Indeed, it is the best possible process for 
the training of freemen, educated or uneducated, rich or poor. 

It is often assumed that the educated classes become im- 
potent in a democracy, because the representatives of those 
classes are not exclusively chosen to public office. This argu- 
ment is a very fallacious one. It assumes that the public offices 
are the places of greatest influence; whereas, in the United 
States, at least, that is conspicuously not the case. In a democ- 
racy, it is important to discriminate influence from authority. 
Rulers and magistrates may or may not be persons of influence; 
but many persons of influence never become rulers, magistrates, 

IV [ i8 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

or representatives in parliaments or legislatures. The complex 
industries of a modern state, and its innumerable corporation 
services, offer great fields for administrative talent which were 
entirely unknown to preceding generations; and these new ac- 
tivities attract many ambitious and capable men more strongly 
than the public service. These men are not on that account lost 
to their country or to society. The present generation has 
wholly escaped from the conditions of earlier centuries, when 
able men who were not great land-owners had but three outlets i 
for their ambition — the army, the church, or the national civil 
service. The national service, whether in an empire, a limited 
monarchy, or a republic, is now only one of many fields which 
offer to able and patriotic men an honorable and successful 
career. Indeed, legislation and pubhc administration neces- 
sarily have a very second-hand quality; and more and more legis- 
lators and administrators become dependent on the researches of 
scholars, men of science, and historians, and follow in the footsteps ' 
of inventors, economists, and political philosophers. Political 
leaders are very seldom leaders of thought; they are generally 
trying to induce masses of men to act on principles thought out 
long before. Their skill is in the selection of practicable ap- 
proximations to the ideal; their arts are arts of exposition and 
persuasion ; their honor comes from fidelity under trying circum- 
stances to familiar principles of public duty. The real leaders of 
American thought in this century have been preachers, teachers, 
jurists, seers, and poets. While it is of the highest importance, 
under any form of government, that the public servants should \ 
be men of intelligence, education, and honor, it is no objection ' 
to any given form, that under it large numbers of educated 
and honorable citizens have no connection with the public 
service. 

Well-to-do Europeans, when reasoning about the working of 
democracy, often assume that under any government the prop- 
erty-holders are synonymous with the intelligent and educated 
class. That is not the case in the American democracy. Any 
one who has been connected with a large American university 
can testify that democratic institutions produce plenty of rich 
people who are not educated and plenty of educated people who 

IV [ 19 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

arc not rich, just as media; val society produced illiterate nobles 
and cultivated monks. 

Persons who object to manhood suffrage as the last resort for 
the settlement of pubhc questions are bound to show where, in 
all the world, a juster or more practicable regulation or conven- 
tion has been arrived at. The objectors ought at least to indi- 
cate where the ultimate decision should, in their judgment, rest — 
as, for example, with the land-owners, or the property- holders, or 
the graduates of secondar}' schools, or the professional classes. 
He would be a bold political philosopher who, in these days, 
should propose that the ultimate tribunal should be constituted 
in any of these ways. All the experience of the civilized world 
fails to indicate a safe personage, a safe class, or a safe minority, 
with which to deposit this power of ultimate decision. On the 
contrary, the experience of civilization indicates that no select 
person or class can be trusted with that power, no matter what 
the principle of selection. The convention that the majority of 
males shall decide public questions has obviously great recom- 
mendations. It is apparently fairer than the rule of any minor- 
ity, and it is sure to be supported by an adecjuate physical force. 
Moreover, its decisions are likely to enforce themselves. Even 
in matters of doubtful prognostication, the fact that a majority 
of the males do the prophesying tends to the fulfilment of the 
prophecy. At any rate, the adoption or partial adoption of 
universal male suffrage by several civilized nations is coincident 
with unexampled ameliorations in the condition of the least for- 
tunate and most numerous classes of the population. To this 
general amelioration many causes have doubtless contributed; 
but it is reasonable to suppose that the acquisition of the power 
which comes with votes has had something to do with it. 

Timid or conservative people often stand aghast at the pos- 
sible directions of democratic desire, or at some of the predicted 
results of democratic rule ; but meantime the actual experience 
of the American democracy proves: i, that property has never 
been safer under any form of government ; 2, that no people have 
ever welcomed so ardently new machinery, and new inventions 
generally; 3, that religious toleration was never carried so far, 
and never so universally accepted; 4, that nowhere have the 

IV [20] 



THE SUCCESSES 

power and disposition to read been so general; 5, that nowhere 
has governmental power been more adequate, or more freely 
exercised, to levy and collect taxes, to raise armies and to disband 
them, to maintain public order, and to pay off great public debts 
— national, State, and town; 6, that nowhere have property and 
well-being been so widely diffused; and 7, that no form of gov- 
ernment ever inspired greater affection and loyalty, or prompted 
to greater personal sacrifices in supreme moments. In view of 
these solid facts, speculations as to what universal suft'rage would 
have done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or may do 
in the twentieth, seem futile indeed. The most civilized nations 
of the world have all either adopted this final appeal to manhood 
suffrage, or they are approaching that adoption by rapid stages. 
The United States, having no customs or traditions of an oppo- 
site sort to overcome, have led the nations in this direction, and 
have had the honor of devising, as a result of practical experience, 
the best safeguards for universal suffrage, safeguards which, in 
the main, are intended to prevent hasty public action, or action 
based on sudden discontents or temporary spasms of public 
feeling. These checks are intended to give time for discussion 
and deliberation, or, in other words, to secure the enlightenment 
of the voters before the vote. If, under new conditions, existing 
safeguards prove insufficient, the only wise course is to devise 
new safeguards. 

The United States have made to civilization a fourth con- 
tribution of a very hopeful sort, to which public attention needs 
to be directed, lest temporary evils connected therewith should 
prevent the continuation of this beneficent action. The United 
States have furnished a demonstration that people belonging to a 
great variety of races or nations are, under favorable circum- 
stances, fit for political freedom. It is the fashion to attribute to 
the enormous immigration of the last fifty years some of the 
failures of the American political system, and particularly the 
American failure in municipal government, and the introduction 
in a few States of the rule of the irresponsible party foremen 
known as "bosses." Impatient of these evils, and hastily ac- 
cepting this improbable explanation of them, some people wish 
to depart from the American policy of welcoming immigrants. 

IV [ 21 ] 



THE^UCCESSES 

In two respects the absorption of large numbers of immigrants 
from many nations into the American commonweahh has been 
of great service to mankind. In the first place, it has demon- 
strated that people who at home have been subject to every sort 
of aristocratic or despotic or military oppression become within 
less than a generation serviceable citizens of a republic; and, in 
the second place, the United States have thus educated to free- 
dom many millions of men. Furthermore, the comparatively 
high degree of happiness and prosperity enjoyed by the people 
of the United States has been brought home to multitudes in 
Europe by friends and relatives who have emigrated to this 
country, and has commended free institutions to them in the 
best possible way. This is a legitimate propaganda vastly more 
effective than any annexation or conquest of unwilling people, or 
of people unprepared for liberty. 

It is a great mistake to suppose that the process of assimilat- 
ing foreigners began in the last century. The eighteenth century 
provided the colonies with a great mixture of peoples, although 
the English race predominated then, as now. When the Revo- 
lution broke out, there were already English, Irish, Scotch, 
Dutch, Germans, French, Portuguese, and Swedes in the colo- 
nies. The French were, to be sure, in small proportion, and 
were almost exclusively Huguenot refugees, but they were a 
valuable element in the population. The Germans were well 
diffused, having established themselves in New York, Penn- 
sylvania, Virginia, and Georgia. The Scotch were scattered 
through all the colonics. Pennsylvania, especially, was in- 
habited by an extraordinary mixture of nationalities and relig- 
ions. Since steam-navigation on the Atlantic and railroad 
transportation on the North American continent became cheap 
and easy, the tide of immigration has greatly increased ; but it is 
very doubtful if the amount of assimilation going on in the nine- 
teenth century has been any larger, in proportion to the popula- 
tion and wealth of the country, than it was in the eighteenth. 
The main difference in the assimilation going on in the two cen- 
turies is this, that in the eighteenth centuiy the newcomers were 
almost all Protestants, while in the nineteenth century a con- 
siderable proportion have been Catholics. One result, however, 

IV [ 22 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

of the importation of large numbers of Catholics into the United 
States has been a profound modification of the Roman Catholic 
Church in regard to the manners and customs of both the clergy 
and the laity, the scope of the authority of the priest, and the 
attitude of the Catholic Church toward public education. This 
American modification of the Roman Church has reacted 
strongly on the Church in Europe. 

Another great contribution to civilization made by the United 
States is the diffusion of material well-being among the popula- 
tion. No country in the world approaches the United States in 
this respect. It is seen in that diffused elementary education 
which implants for life a habit of reading, and in the habitual 
optimism which characterizes the common people. It is seen in 
the housing of the people and of their domestic animals, in the 
comparative costliness of their food, clothing, and household 
furniture, in their implements, vehicles, and means of trans- 
portation, and in the substitution, on a prodigious scale, of the 
work of machinery for the work of men's hands. This last item 
in American well-being is quite as striking in agriculture, mining, 
and fishing, as it is in manufactures. The social effects of the 
manufacture of power, and of the discovery of means of putting 
that power just where it is wanted, have been more striking in the 
United States than anywhere else. Manufactured and distrib- 
uted power needs intelligence to direct it : the bicycle is a blind 
horse, and must be steered at every instant; somebody must 
show a steam-drill where to strike and how deep to go. So far 
as men and women can substitute for the direct expenditure of 
muscular strength the more intelligent effort of designing, tend- 
ing, and guiding machines, they win promotion in the scale of 
being, and make their lives more interesting as well as more 
productive. It is in the invention of machinery for producing 
and distributing power, and at once economizing and elevating 
human labor, that American ingenuity has been most con- 
spicuously manifested. The high price of labor in a sparsely 
settled country has had something to do with this striking result; 
but the genius of the people and of their government has had 
much more to do with it. As proof of the general proposition, 
it suffices merely to mention the telegraph and telephone, the 

IV [ 23 ] 



THE SUCCESSES 

sewing-machine, the cotton-gin, the mower, reaper, and thresh- 
ing-machine, the dish-washing machine, the river steamboat, the 
sleeping-car, the boot and shoe machinery, and the watch ma- 
chinery. The ultimate effects of these and kindred inventions 
are quite as much intellectual as physical, and they are develop- 
ing and increasing with a portentous rapidity which sometimes 
suggests a doubt whether the bodily forces of men and women 
are adequate to resist the new mental strains brought upon them. 
However this may prove to be in the future, the clear result in the 
present is an unexampled diffusion of well-being in the United 
States. 

These five contributions to civilization — peace-keeping, relig- 
ious toleration, the development of manhood suffrage, the wel- 
coming of new-comers, and the diffusion of well-being — I hold to 
have been eminently characteristic of our country, and so im- 
portant that, in spite of the qualifications and deductions which 
every candid citizen would admit with regard to eveiy one of 
them, they will ever be held in the grateful remembrance of man- 
kind. They are reasonable grounds for a steady, glowing 
patriotism. They have had much to do, both as causes and as 
effects, with the material prosperity of the United States; but 
they are all five essentially moral contributions, being triumphs 
of reason, enterprise, courage, faith, and justice, over passion, 
selfishness, inertness, timidity, and distrust. Beneath each one 
of these developments there lies a strong ethical sentiment, a 
strenuous moral and social purpose. It is for such work that 
multitudinous democracies are fit. 

In regard to all five of these contributions, the characteristic 
policy of our country has been from time to time threatened with 
reversal — is even now so threatened. It is for true patriots to 
insist on the maintenance of these historic purposes and policies 
of the people of the United States. Our country's future perils, 
whether already visible or still unimagined, are to be met with 
courage and constancy founded firmly on these popular achieve- 
ments in the past. 



IV [24] 



V 



THE BEGINNINGS 

"THE MAN OF THE PAST" 

BY 

E. KAY ROBINSON 



T^ROM this general outline oj the organization oj our world 
oj to-day, its position, its plans and its problems, we turn 
now to look more closely at the details. First, ive must go hack to 
the earliest problem oj all, we must look to our racers very beginning, 
to the origin oj lije itselj, and oj mankind. Our steps jail here on 
doubtjul ground, amid vague mists. We attempt to penetrate 
through ages immeasurable, through years that perhaps ap- 
proach the infinite. Science ofjers herselj as our guide and guard; 
yet even Science is here wavering and uncertain, must soar 
through these dim regions on wings oj the imagination, must 
answer us with injerence and supposition, rather than with defi- 
nite conclusions, positive and ascertainable jacts, such as ordi- 
narily she prejers to dwell among, and jrom which she gathers all 
her strength. 

It were well also to premise that this backward glance involves 
no problem oj religion. There is no modern churchman who 
would maintain that suddenly, in an instant oj time, man was 
created out oj good, brown dirt. The creative process jrom which 
the human body sprang, extended over centuries, over eons oj time. 
The length, the giant reach oj this slow process, does not, however, 
affect the jact oj the creation. Science is quick and eager to insist 
on this. Nor does the long time lessen the wonder oj the jact. To 
many minds, indeed, it does but increase the mystery, the " miracle^ ^ 
oj unending patience, oj jar-sighted purpose, oj a wisdom beyond 
our thought or measure. 

V [i] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

But these tvords are beside the intention oj the present address. 
The duty 0} religion is with the soul, not with the body; with the 
juttire, not with the past; with the purpose 0} creation, not the 
physical facts employed in its accomplishment. It is these physi- 
cal jacts which are here imagined and arrayed for us by Mr. E. 
Kay Robinson, the well-known English scientific writer. 

About twenty years ago I was permitted to introduce to 
readers the man of the future, that mysterious being who will 
look back across the dim gulf of time upon us, his ancestors, with 
much of the same incredulous but not unkindly scorn with which 
we mentally caricature the poor ' Missing Link ' in the chain of 
human genealogy. ' The man of the future,' I then said, ' will be 
a toothless, hairless, and stiff-limbed being, incapable of ex- 
tended locomotion, with no divisions between the toes, and 
priding himself upon various other "developments" which 
would not at the present time be regarded as improvements.' 
Much has been written on the subject since then; but the general 
tendency of essayists is to confirm the view which I had some- 
what abruptly expressed, and to agree that the man of the future 
will hold his place, in the foremost files of time to come, by brain 
power alone, discarding the animal characteristics of teeth and 
hair, agility and combativeness, and disdaining the retention of 
such useless peculiarities as independent toes, each liable to the 
drawback of corns and chilblains. 

It was not easy, however, even in the enthusiasm of youth, 
surfeited with Darwinism, to feel altogether proud of so maimed 
a descendant; and as years pass retrospect becomes the more 
congenial habit of thought. Youth is the age of enthusiasm and 
curiosity as to the future; for youth has no past of its own, and 
therefore little sympathy with the past of the world at large. As 
the vista of years lengthens behind us, however, we fall to count- 
ing the milestones of our journey through Hf e, and this draws our 
eyes to the more distant landscape, with its dim traces of the 
devious paths trodden by those before us. 

Science has not yet thrown her search-hghts to the uttermost 
horizon of that misty landscape, and mortal vision still has limits 
which prevent us from seeing what the ancestor of humanity 
V [2] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

was like before he became an entity. Even the outhnes of his 
earhest being within our scientific ken are a trifle blurred and in- 
distinct. We must therefore be content with the general assur- 
ance that the original man, the ancestor of the human race, was 
what would in modern language be loosely described as a micro- 
scopic dab of mud. 

There are persons of considerable scientific attainments, still 
outside lunatic asylums, who cherish the hope of discovering the 
secret of the beginning of hfe by witnessing some process of 
spontaneous generation of microbes in bottled fluid; and other 
persons of equal or even greater scientific attainments have 
thought it worth while to conduct elaborate experiments to com- 
bat the views of the others. Both ahke seem to forget that the 
microbe of the present day — however simple his organization 
may appear to the limited power of such microscopes as we 
already possess, or to the clumsy touch of our chemical analyses 
— stands, as man himself does, at the end of a long hne of pro- 
gressive development. His family is as ancient as ours; and, 
like us, he has partly created and partly accommodated himself 
to the conditions which now prevail upon this planet. He is as 
much at home as we are in this world of the twentieth century, 
and on the whole he has succeeded in making himself fairly com- 
fortable. He is, too, the only rival whom we need fear as an 
enemy. Man will never extinguish the microbe, but the microbe 
may extinguish man. To expect him spontaneously to generate 
himself in a bottle of fluid is, then, no less insulting than would 
be the proposal to build a hermetically sealed town and after a 
lapse of a certain time expect it to be filled with men and women, 
or at least babies. If these men of science really desire to see as 
much of the beginning of life as is possible nowadays, let them 
take a basm of water, empty their solutions into it, and throw in 
the empty bottles and corks afterward. Then they will see the 
beginning of Hfe with the naked eye on the surface of the water in 
the basin. 

For what will they see? The empty bottles and the corks will, 
without assistance, either attach themselves to the sides of the 
basin or cluster together in the centre; while those bottles which 
can get rid of the air inside them will dive to the bottom. When 

V [3] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

Newton saw the apple fall, he made a shrewd guess at a great 
truth; but he did not discover that what he saw was Life itself. 
He saw the attraction of the earth for the apple, and we call the 
principle 'gravitation': but if the apple had fallen, like our 
hypothetical empty bottles, into a basin of water, it would have 
bobbed up again to the surface, and ultimately have attached 
itself to the side, unless indeed there had been other objects in 
the basin, whose company it might have sought by preference. 
Attraction is, in fact, not only the universal law of life, but it is 
life itself. So far as those empty bottles and that apple possess 
individual Hfe and power of action, they display it by forcing 
their way through the air or the water in order to attach them- 
selves to the object that attracts them most. How nearly this 
process approaches in appearance sometimes to the highest de- 
velopment of dehberate choice, as we recognize that function in 
ourselves, may be witnessed by any one curious enough to float, 
say, a wooden match and a few grains of sawdust in some water. 
If the water could be kept absolutely motionless it is possible that 
the separate grains of sawdust and the match might be kept 
apart indefinitely, each pinned, as it were, to its own spot on the 
surface of the water by the attraction of the earth, although the 
water, being still more strongly attracted, would insist upon 
occupying the nearer place and so keep the wood floating aloft. 
But in ordinary circumstances the water would sooner or later be 
disturbed, moving the grains of sawdust hither and thither, until 
one by one they come into the sphere of attraction of each other 
or the match or the side of the vessel. It is when they are at- 
tracted to the match that the phenomenon is most interesting. 
There is almost the coyness of courtship in their circling ap- 
proach, until they are quite close, and then it is by a positive leap 
that they throw themselves upon the attractive object and remain 
closely attached to it, insomuch that the water may be rudely 
disturbed without separating them. This not only looks like 
life — it is life : and we may see it also in the stone which, falling 
into a well, does exactly what you or I would do. It obeys the 
downward attraction of the earth, but at the same time recog- 
nizes that of the wall of the well by swerving toward and striking 
it before reaching the bottom. 

V [4] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

Now let us return to our ancestor, the prehistoric dab of mud 
which retrospective vision dimly discerns seated on the surface 
of an as yet inchoate world. It would be more correct, perhaps, 
to say in the surface; for it is only with the eye of imagination 
that we can elevate him above his fellows, and promote him to 
the status of a distinguishable entity, breaking the sky-line of 
that distant horizon. We may take him up by the pound with 
the spade of fancy, and he will slide back into his parent chaos, 
mere slime. Yet even in the shme of the past there were grada- 
tions of rank among its particles. Let us lay down the spade 
and filter the ooze through the meshes of thought ; much — most 
of it — slides through, intangible and imperceptible to the touch, 
but some remains. What ? Particles of matter. And here we 
reach the first milestone of human history. 

What constituted this prehistoric particle of matter, our pen- 
ultimate parent, so far as our present family knowledge extends ? 
We may be content with knowing, from our acquaintance with 
the general law of attraction, that a particle of homogeneous 
matter large enough to be retained in the meshes of a common- 
place mind must be composed of minor atoms sticking together. 
We have seen how grains of sawdust stick together in the water; 
we can see how grains of water stick together in a drop at the end 
of our wet finger; it requires, therefore, no great effort to see how, 
in the ooze where the first scenes in the drama of human life were 
played, atoms stuck together and made particles. It does not 
matter how large or small atoms or particles may be — I use no 
word in a severely scientific or unintelligible-to-the- vulgar sense 
— we know that the law of attraction made those, which had 
attraction for each other and came sufliciently near to each other, 
stick together. How tightly they adhered does not matter either ; 
the fact that they adhered is sufficient, because it means that 
they showed life, and with the commencement of life commenced 
their struggle for continued and improved existence, and their 
upward march toward the top-hatted and kid-gloved style now 
affected by their descendants. 

Viewed across so vast a stretch of time, with its innumerable 
milestones graduating almost to invisible infinity, the progress 
our ancestors had so far made may not appear extensive. But 

V [5] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

the first step of the journey is tnc most important ; they had made 
a start and in the right direction. They had individuahzed 
themselves among the surrounding shme, and had acquired a 
new status and new power. The fruit- vender who places the 
largest strawberries at the top of the basket might plead that he 
does so in obedience to a natural law: for, other things being 
equal, it is undeniably the rule in this world of stress and struggle 
for existence, that the biggest comes to the top. Sometimes other 
things are not equal, and the biggest sinks by sheer weight, 
which may be only another phrase for incapacity to rise. The 
truth of both axioms may be observed by the simple experiment 
of gently shaking a Httle mixed bird-seed in a wine-glass. The 
larger seeds will come to the surface ; but the superior size of the 
stones with which the dishonest seed-merchant has eked out the 
weight of his wares avails them naught. They can be descried 
through the glass, sinking ignobly to the bottom, past even the 
smallest and most insignificant of the seeds. And herein we see 
repeated the first parting that our ancestors suffered — when one 
branch of the family by its inert weight had to sink down below 
and people the interior of the earth with stones and minerals, 
while the other remained above to cover the surface with life and 
beauty. From this momentous epoch in our history, when we 
became the 'upper classes,' we have nothing to do with the 
struggle for existence of our poor relations, the stones. 

Since they parted company with us and came down in the 
world, they have gone through great trials, and have, like human 
unfortunates, suffered the extremes of heat and cold — now 
molten into igneous strata, and now cloven by the frost of glacial 
epochs. But they have also achieved great things: and there 
are beauties in gem and crystal, stalactite and ores of rainbow 
hue, in marbles and alabasters, which still move our minds with 
the sense of a beauty kindred to the loveliest products of the 
hfe — the higher life, as we are justified in regarding it — to which 
our branch of the family has attained; just as, in India, you may 
often find the loveliest women in the lowest castes. 

We soon forgot our poor relations, however: for one step 
necessitates another, and the position of our ancestors, in the sur- 
face of the slough which the world of the past resembled, sub- 

V [6] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

jected them to the inevitable process of knocking against other 
things and each other whenever natural movements agitated 
their surrounding shme. In such conditions it was inevitable 
that they should, like pebbles upon a wave-washed beach, tend 
to assume a rounded or oval outline ; and with the conservatism 
that is the marked characteristic of the animal and vegetable 
kingdom this early shape of our common ancestors is retained in 
the beginning of all Hfe, as in the eggs of birds, reptiles, and in- 
sects, and the seeds of plants : while the fact that we and other 
mammals have left off the habit of laying eggs need not fill us 
with unseemly progressive pride. Comparative anatomy shows 
that we are still conservative to the backbone in our allegiance to 
types that were ours before we had backbones ; for even we are 
oviform in our earhcst beginnings. The first triumph, then, of 
our ancestors was to be able to maintain their position at the top 
of things, generally by their superior size and what we may call 
in a prophetic sense their agility, as opposed to the inert weight 
of their relatives who sank to make the mineral world ; and the 
second was the accidental acquisition of an oval shape, which 
enabled them to survive the buffetings of their neighbors. But 
if they imagined that the struggle for existence was finally de- 
cided by those two achievements, the subsequent experiences of 
us, their descendants, show how vastly they were mistaken. In 
what way, then, did this struggle for existence next spur them on 
to self -improvement ? It is obvious that those were most favor- 
ably circumstanced who possessed, in addition to relative size 
and regularity of outhnc, a special power of cohesion beyond the 
ordinary attraction of matter to matter. We see varying degrees 
of attraction around us every day of our Hves : we feel them in 
the presence of victuals and drink, in the choice of occupations, 
and above all in the vicinity of the opposite sex. The various 
forms and degrees of special attraction may, therefore, be de- 
scribed as affinity; and our ancestors certainly belonged to that 
section of the upper classes of the upper past whose constituent 
parts possessed marked affinity for each other. A particle 
otherwise composed would have within it a force constantly 
tending to disruption, and in the long run this tendency to decom- 
position would prove a decisive disadvantage in the struggle for 

V [7] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

existence. And among the survivors new subtle distinctions 
were soon observable — just as among their successors of the 
present day there is always an elite of the elite — owing to the birth 
of the discriminating faculty. In proportion to the affmity of the 
elements composing these early beings would be their position 
in its substance. Those which were the more strongly attracted 
would be drawn to the centre ; those less privileged would stand 
in a ring outside, getting as near the centre as they could ; the 
unattractive detrimentals would be severely dropped. Thus 
each of our ancestors was, as one of their wise descendants has 
discovered of modern man, a microcosm in himself, with satel- 
lites in their orbits round his centre. And even as suitable 
atoms came within the radius of his attraction they took their 
proper place, and the larger he grew the more attractive he 
seemed and the ring of outsiders grew closer. Thus, although 
to the eye of fact our ancestor was still scarcely, if at all, dis- 
tinguishable from the slime in which he continued to reside, he 
had made a great stride up the ladder of evolution. He had 
mastered the secret of assimilation and of growth. For we 
must note here the wide potential distinction between this form 
of development and the mere accretion by which minerals in- 
crease in bulk. The growth of our ancestors took place by 
means of absorption and selection of what we would now call 
food, which was separated into its constituent elements according 
to their attractiveness, and distributed to the various parts of 
the body. In other words, our ancestor digested and assimilated 
his food ; and, at that stage, man could do no more. Stones have 
not learned to do it yet. 

The faculty which next calls for notice, though all matter had 
possessed it from the first, is that of motion. Everything which 
was attracted to anything else moved toward it ; but our ances- 
tor belonged to that fortunate class of beings whose complex at- 
tractions were so evenly balanced that he was always drawn 
whither it was advantageous to be. He was neither too earthy 
nor too spiritual in his affinities : he was a man of the world, and 
as such kept himself always in evidence. As he attracted attrac- 
tive particles to his inside, so was he drawn in the direction where 
attractive particles were thickest. Thus early was developed 

V [8] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

that faculty of mankind during social entertainments to cluster 
round the bars and supper- tables. Oh! man was getting on! 
And here it is to be observed that the attraction, we may call it 
the yearning, of our ancestor for his food proceeded directly 
from his inside; that is to say, the central part of him, which had 
the strongest attraction for the stuff he wanted, was the part 
which drew him toward it. We, his superior descendants, have 
a brain which polices our actions, and we do not reach after a 
sandwich with our stomachs. But we need not be proud. Our 
relatives, the amoeba and the star-fish and others, do this thing 
still, and the habit is one to which we owe much. In default of 
organs of prehension, mastication, and so on, it was something 
for our ancestor to be able to reach out, as it were, with some- 
thing for his dinner. Not that, in all probability, he greedily ex- 
truded his simple internal arrangements. It sufficed if their 
tendency was to gravitate toward that margin of his ovoid person 
near which the food was situated. The rest was simple, for the 
outer ring-rind (or skin we might call it nowadays) of semi- 
attractive atoms with which he had clothed himself had no such 
cohesion as to refuse admittance to a favored morsel. It was 
against our first parent's claim to very high rank, as rank goes in 
modern times, that he took in his food at any part of his person; 
but here, again, the amoeba — what evolutionists would have 
done without the amoeba I cannot say — comes to our rescue. 
The amoeba does it, unblushingly, in the glare of this so-called 
twentieth century. 

And here we come to the penultimate triumph of Hfe; namely, 
the faculty of reproduction. Hitherto the life of the individual 
was indefinite. The influence- of the sun was necessary to pro- 
duce that equipoise of conflicting attractions— the earHest 'bal- 
ance of power' known in mundane poHtics— which enabled our 
honest ancestor to hold his own among others, as may be seen 
from the diurnal rotation of our elementary functions. The in- 
fluence of the moon had much to say in the matter also: witness 
the lunar periods in the life of many animals. And that we are 
of the earth, earthy, goes without saying: else we would not be 
glued to it by our feet all our lives. Those creatures survived 
(our ancestor among the number) who were able to accommo- 

V • [9] 



THE B^INNINGS 

date themselves to the changing conditions created by these con- 
flicting influences. We were like frontier tribes in Central Asia, 
displaying all kinds of unexpected forms of activity, according as 
one or another ' sphere of influence ' overlapped us. And when I 
say ' we,' I do not mean that at this period of evolution there were 
lots of us. All the hopes of humanity were centred in one per- 
son, and with all the good-will in the world I cannot distinguish 
him, our ancestor, from the other dabs of mud around him. I 
would throw my arms around his neck if I could And him: but 
he had no neck, and did not appreciably differ from what, in our 
vulgar modern way, we should call 'sludge' or something like 
that. 

And the first accident which happened to him, although it 
prepared the way for the publication of Darwin's 'Origin of 
Species,' would have appeared to his hmitcd vision, if he had had 
any, in the light of a misfortune. I am inchned to believe that it 
was at the; close of an unusually hot day in spring that he got left 
high and dry above the high-water mark of the period. Not 
very dry, because everything, including the air, was wet in those 
days, but still out of his element rather. And it is always this 
factor of novel, and apparently unsuitable, environment which 
has brought out the highest qualities of the human race. Driven 
by necessity he invented — invcnio, *1 come into,' therefore 'I 
find out,' therefore ' I invent ' — reproduction. Let us think what 
this means. Hitherto the life of a species, or a genus, or a king- 
dom, had been the Uf c of the individual. It did not matter how 
cleverly our ancestor or any of the other persons who might have 
become the ancestors of beings totally different from ourselves 
adapted themselves to their surroundings: without reproduc- 
tion, the world would have been filled only with the original in- 
dividuals who were once microscopic dabs of mud. All that was 
needed for everlasting existence was the faculty of adaptation to 
the various forces of attraction. We see one instance in the 
successful adaptation of the air to the circumstances of life. The 
air was a creature, just like our first ancestor — more volatile and 
lively perhaps, and less severely handicapped in the struggle for 
existence. And it has made no progress. It goes on attracting 
suitable elements into itself when it can, and parting with them 
V [id] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

when it must ; and it has grown to an immense size. It covers 
the whole earth : but, hke the human beings of tropical climes, it 
has not yet found any incentive to further evolution because it 
has never been placed in sufliciently difficult circumstances. So 
far as we know, it is the same air that rose aloft when our ances- 
tor grovelled in the shme ever so long ago. It has remained ' it,' 
while we have become 'he's' and 'she's.' The water is another 
creature who has been able to flow along in its old course without 
interruption, so far as we know : although the glacial epoch may 
have hit it hard, and the Flood have buoyed it up with foolish 
hopes of swallowing the whole wide world. It did not reckon 
with the insignificant creature who, whether in the Ark or by 
other means, weathered the era of water's dominion, and has 
emerged triumphant to build bridges and water-mills and ocean- 
going ships, and now talks of using the 'wasted' strength of 
water to do all his work for him, turn his machinery, hght his 
house, and provide the force for driving his tricycle. Here we 
see on a world-wide scale the grand triumph of those who have 
struggled against difficulties, as in detail we see it also in the 
victory of Northern European races over the soft and luxurious 
inhabitants of the ' Sunny South ' and tropics. 

Well, our ancestor might have had the good, or bad, luck to 
find himself so adapted to surrounding circumstances that he 
continued to expand and grow, swallowing everything he had a 
mind to, until his slimy, shapeless bulk covered what we call con- 
tinents and oceans, and became in size a worthy rival of the air 
and the water, and an example to the various minerals cramped 
down below in their restricted areas. But in that case he would 
not have been our ancestor, because it was only owing to the fact 
that he met with an accident in being cast up beyond the reach 
of ordinary tides that he was compelled to invent reproduction. 
He may not have seemed happy at first. The air scoffingly 
passed over his surface and dried his skin : but he took what he 
wanted, all the same, from the air as it passed. His more fluid 
portions displayed an unworthy inclination to sink into the 
ground, but he got something out of the ground too. And when 
the sun rose next morning, it shone upon something just a Uttle 
different from anything which it had seen before. Shrivelled 
V [ii] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

somewhat, and as deplorable as a stranded jelly-fish, our ances- 
tor boldly met the gaze of the sun — for was not he the prospec- 
tive father of Britons ?— and he took what he wanted from the 
sunlight. So the day passed and the night, and other days and 
nights to follow, until another high tide came at the full moon 
and washed over our parent once more. And what happened 
then? During his long rest between high- water marks he had 
got stuck too tightly to the ground to leave it again. Some of 
him had indeed sunk into the crevices between particles of the 
soil— a habit which the roots of the vegetable kingdom have in- 
herited and improved upon — and held him where he was. But 
the bulk of him strove to obey loyally the old impulse that used 
to draw him upward to the sunlight when he was what natural- 
ists would call a free-swimming embryo of his present self. The 
attraction of food was strong upon him also, and the moon that 
drew up the tides strained him, too, toward her. Thus for the 
first time in his life he felt, as Britain felt when the American 
colonies claimed the right to independence, that he must part 
with a portion of himself. It stretched upward, and the bond 
that held them together grew thinner and weaker. His rind — 
may I call it 'skin'? — assumed an elongated shape, with an 
hour-glass constriction between the part which held to the earth 
and the part that would float through the water. At last, with a 
wrench almost like that of dissolution, it parted; and a fragment 
of him, small, globular, and free, as once he was himself, rose 
upward to the sunlight or to bask in the moon's rays. What 
was left of our ancestor settled down again, contentedly, for he 
had borne a son. Nor was that the only one. The changing 
seasons brought him new opportunities of growth, and at favor- 
able periods he cast off in the same way other fragments of him- 
self; and continued doing so to a very great age, until perhaps 
his great-great-great- and so on grandchildren who had risen in 
the world would have been ashamed to recognize the simple old 
fellow, with no organs and no specialized functions whatever, as 
their ancestor. We are not so proud. 

We cannot be certain, of course, that this new power of re- 
production was gained by a single individual only, or that evolu- 
tion had taken place in no other directions. The earth was filled 
V [12] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

with rude variations of types, which were holding their own in 
the struggle for existence, because the favorable circumstances 
which gave each of them a start were being incessantly repeated 
with the changes of days and seasons. But our concern is with 
our ancestor and his progeny only. These might not have sur- 
vived, and quite a different being to myself might now be specu- 
lating upon the origin of the world's inhabitants, but for the fact 
that our ancestor's children proved themselves to be true chips of 
the old block. He had invented reproduction : they responded 
with 'heredity.' 

When the sun rose next day there may have been little or 
nothing in the appearance of these individuals to mark their 
immense potential difference from their comrades all around. 
There was no analytical chemist to examine them and demon- 
strate that they were composed of exactly the same elements in 
the same combination as their father ; and there were no men of 
science to draw the conclusion that, when chance threw them into 
the same situation as that into which he had originally fallen, 
they would behave exactly as he did. Yet this is what our 
second ancestor could not help doing. He behaved as his father 
— the first father in the world — had done; that is to say, he 
parted with portions of himself and created new creatures in his 
own likeness. Thus was death vanquished. Hitherto the Ufe 
of all the types in the world ended with the individual; and 
although similarity of surrounding circumstances induced uni- 
formity, there was no heredity. Now there had come into the 
world a creature with the faculty of subdividing, i.e., propagat- 
ing, itself. 

In the lowest orders of animal and plant life— the orders, that 
is to say, which have advanced least from our common starting- 
point — we still find this dual form of existence in the shape of a 
fixed parent with free-swimming young, destined in their turn to 
become fixed and give birth to free progeny. 

At the first glance it might not be thought that much had 
been gained by this new development; but let us recapitulate. 
Our ancestor was still not very distinguishable from a dab of 
mud ; but he had acquired the power of 

(i) Attracting or Drawing into his own Substance those Ele- 

V [13] 



TH^BEGINNINGS 

ments which had jor him' the Strongest Affinity — or, as we should 
say nowadays, which he Hked most. Other less potently attract- 
ed elements went to form his indurated integument or skin; 
and yet others, unattracted — or, as we say now, unattractive or 
innutritious— were rejected altogether. Thus in a rude way he 
performed the functions which we now carry on by means of 
speciahzcd organs when we breathe, eat, or drink. 

(2) Moving Upward or Dowmvard or Sideways when it 
suited him — by which I do not mean that he exercised any inde- 
pendent voHtion, such as we think that we ourselves do, when he 
went hither or thither, but that he obeyed inherited impulses 
which tended to his advantage. If they had not he would not 
have inherited them, for they would have so handicapped his 
ancestors in the struggle for existence that they would not have 
survived- to produce him. The only movements which were 
perpetuated, therefore, were such as the accidental experience 
of generations proved to be good for the race ; and this remains 
still the highest aim of all our human actions. 

(3) Reproducing his Kind. — And upon this accidental ac- 
quirement the permanence and improvement of every other gift 
depended. For by the time that our first ancestor, in the proper 
hereditary sense, produced, or rather detached, from himself his 
first oviform offspring, the world was full of what were then the 
highest types of creatures. That they were not high according 
to modern ideas may be reahzed from the fact that each indi- 
vidual had gone through the whole course of evolution up to date 
in his own person. I should not be writing this article if I had 
to begin by inventing language; then discovering the truths of 
science; then bringing out the inventions of printing, paper- 
making, and the manufacture of ink and machinery ; then have 
to educate the pubHc and induct into their minds the idea that 
printed matter was worth purchasing; then estabhsh an editor, 
and finally bring him my article. I should not have got very far 
into this programme before death would cut short my career. 
No; many a^ons ago, in the first feeble sound uttered by one 
living creature and heard by another, was the germ and natural 
origin of this published volume. Therefore we must not despise 
those early contemporaries of our ancestor who inherited nothing 

V [14] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

from their ancestor and had to do all their own origin of species 
for themselves. Besides, de mortuis nil nisi boniim; and most of 
them disappeared forever off the face of the earth as our family 
multipUed, thanks to the subtle advantage which its members 
possessed of letting bits of themselves start periodically upon hf e 
on their own account. As the other creatures broke up or be- 
came decomposed for one reason or another, this multiplying 
type gradually absorbed their elements — 'ate them,' we should 
say now — and each fragment became in turn sufficiently obese to 
part with more fragments, and so on, until the world was filled 
with them. 

But all this while insensible variations were being introduced 
into this hereditary type. Infinitely small departures by accident 
from the original were found to give new generations the slight 
determining advantage which decides the struggle for existence : 
and of these, two ultimately survived. One was a type of crea- 
ture which attracted within itself such elements as were needed 
for the sustenance of life through infinitely small apertures or 
pores in its skin, and the other, the bolder type, which drew 
within it by the same force of attraction other entire creatures, 
subsequently separating the desired elements from those which 
were not required. 

The first type became the parent of all vegetables, which 
draw their sustenance in microscopic solution from earth, water, 
air, or decomposed organisms ; and from the second type origi- 
nated the animal world, which captures its food in the shape of 
other organized beings, animal or vegetable, and assimilates the 
parts required for sustenance, rejecting the residuum. With the 
first type we have no concern here save to notice that it has 
proved to the advantage of this class to remain usually in a fixed 
position, in the shape of trees and seaweeds, which draw nourish- 
ment from their surroundings, being content with very modest 
arrangements for the mobility of their offspring, in the shape of 
spores or seeds. 

The second type of creature — the ancestor of the animal 
kingdom — preferred the life of motion. Some indeed, as corals 
or sea anemones, retain the stationary habit, and many mollusks 
attach themselves to fixed spots: but the habit of living upon 

V [15] 



THE BEGINNINGS 



W 



organic creatures, while it materially assisted development, ne- 
cessitated in most cases free motion, either to fresh fields and new 
pastures or to happier hunting grounds when the old ones were 
exhausted. And the development of the higher classes of the 
animal kingdom depended entirely upon the habit of locomotion 
adopted. They all started from the common accidental device 
of excrescences protruding beyond the outline of the body, against 
which floating bodies lodged and were thence absorbed : but in 
one type the tendency was developed to produce these excres- 
cences impartially on all sides of the body, thus producing ulti- 
mately radiate creatures like starfish and polypi, while another 
type had the advantage, as it has proved, of acquiring the habit of 
annexing its food 'end on,' so to speak. As ages passed in- 
numerable variations of this type were doubtless produced, but 
it seems that, again, two only survived. One of these attained 
mobility and safety — for at a very early period those only began 
to survive who could protect themselves against the absorptive 
faculties of their neighbors — in a jointed and hardened integu- 
ment : while the other type had the joints and the stiffening in- 
side. From the former type have descended all such creatures 
as worms, woodlice, lobsters, and insects; and with these we 
have no further concern. Our ancestor belonged to the other 
type; for he was undoubtedly a person with his stifTening inside, 
else what should we be doing for backbones ? He still lived in 
the shallows of the vast sea, propelling himself through the water 
by the waggling of his body; but as ages passed, one member of 
the family acquired the habit of scrambling over the mud by 
means of projections, which in succeeding generations were im- 
proved into rudimentary limbs, stiffened by lateral prolongations 
of the stiffening inside. That is why our legs and arms are 
jointed to our backbones. Perhaps the modern goggle-eyed 
mudfish, which wabbles and wallows in the slimy mangrove 
swamps of the East, most nearly reproduces in outline the first 
great advance made by our ancestors after they had acquired 
jointed backbones and rudimentary limbs; and though the 
snakes have dispensed with limbs altogether, and the fishes have 
modified them to fins, our branch of the family undoubtedly 
made the wiser choice in attaching less importance to the wag- 

V [i6] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

gling of their hinder end as a means of progression than to the 
use of those lateral processes which have become our limbs. 
The wisdom of the choice may not have been obvious at first; 
but the blessings of evolution generally come in disguise. In- 
deed, to the philosopher of those days, had there been one, it 
might even have seemed that when at an earlier stage our parents 
neglected the vegetable habit of safely planting themselves upon 
a suitable spot, they made a serious mistake, and he would have 
pointed to the striking contrast between the luxuriance of vegeta- 
tion compared with the struggling Hfe of the crawling creatures 
at its roots. Even to-day, if it were merely a question of the 
difference between the mangrove tree and the mudfish which 
paddles about under its tangled branches, the advantage might 
not to a casual observer from another planet seem to be all on the 
side of the mudfish. But we who have also chosen locomotion, 
and to that end have adopted the system of backbone and Hmbs, 
know that, whatever pleasures plants may enjoy, they can know 
little of the joys of hunting, fighting, and love-making, the 
trinity of functions which constitute animal ' Hfe.' Indeed, from 
the animal's point of view the majority of plants might just as 
well be dead, for all the pleasure which they can have, and yet 
the only difference between the earliest animal and the earhest 
plant, children of a common parent, was that they chose different 
methods of obtaining nutriment. 

And at every subsequent parting of the branches of the genea- 
logical tree of humanity we can see how by chance our ancestors 
always had forced upon them that w^hich was the best for the 
future. When, for instance, the members of our branch of the 
family began to crawl about clumsily on dry land, dragging 
heavy tails after them, how clumsy and foohsh they must have 
appeared in comparison with their cousins who retained aquatic 
habits and swiftly darted hither and thither through the water 
with a waggle of the body and sweep of the wide tail! Even 
when the burden of the tail grew less and the hmbs became more 
prominent and powerful — a transformation which we may see 
repeated each spring in the development of the frog from the 
tadpole — how small the advantage would have appeared to a 
philosopher of the period ! Indeed, comparing the types of frog 

V [17] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

and crocodile, it is more than likely that he would have given the 
preference to the saurian. But the highest evolution arises from 
the successful negotiation of the greatest obstacles; as we may 
see in the superiority of our hardy Northern races, who have 
always been compelled to labor in order to live, over the uncivil- 
ized inhabitants of luxuriant regions where the problem of hveli- 
hood presents no difficulties. So long as monkeys can live hke 
monkeys they will remain monkeys; but the hard struggle for 
existence may teach them, too, as it has taught us, to acquire new 
powers in order to escape extinction, and then they will cease to 
be monkeys, though they will not be men. They parted com- 
pany from us at the last corner in our difficult journey, and there 
are no short-cuts to recover lost ground in evolution. And we 
cannot help f eehng sorry for the monkeys, because it really seems 
as if this particular turning was the only one of real importance 
since our common ancestor elected by accident to have his stiffen- 
ing inside instead of outside. Between the eating, fighting, and 
love-making of the crocodile, the eagle, the lion, or the whale, 
and that of the monkey, there does not seem much difference; 
and what other joy in life has he which they have not ? He has, 
in fact, gained nothing by belonging to our branch of the family 
when we discarded our tails as means of locomotion; retained 
our four limbs for the purpose of running on the ground instead 
of flapping two of them Hke birds ; and learned to use our toes for 
the purpose of grasping. The originator of the monkey family 
may indeed have considered, if he thought about the matter at 
all, that our ancestor was much to be pitied when he began to 
abandon the use of his hind toes in this way, for the greater con- 
venience of a flat foot in running or walking. And no doubt the 
abandonment was quite involuntary on our part. It may be 
that our ancestor was driven forth to fmd his living in a treeless 
land, where he acquired the habit of running hungrily after the 
prey on which he was forced to subsist, in place of fruit plucked 
without effort in the primeval forests. Perhaps it was in some 
such chase that — possibly in a fit of anger such as baulked mon- 
keys fall into — he seized his first missile and flung it, with the 
happiest effect, at his escaping dinner. Hence the art of hunting 
and the use of weapons. And familiarity with the weapon in 

V [i8] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

time suggested its use as a tool, the earliest application of the tool 
being doubtless analogous to carving-knife or hammer, to divide 
a slaughtered animal among the family or to smash through the 
hard shell of turtle or moUusk. Speech was first evolved by the 
necessities of combination to guard against enemies: for an 
animal which had learned to use lethal weapons, missiles, and 
tools ceased to be dependent upon either his personal agihty or 
powerful teeth for the purposes of offence and defence. It was 
doubtless by combination that our ancestors excavated their cave 
fortress ; and from the necessities of watch and ward, as well as 
the constant companionship within, arose the habit of speech, 
rising from mere signals to action, such as grunts of anger and 
cries of warning, to notes of encouragement, admonition, ap- 
proval, and so on. Thence language would naturally develop in 
the direction of expressing domestic needs and wishes : then com- 
munal instructions and words of command, with expressions of 
assent, dissent, or criticism. Thus by degrees speech was built 
up, and by combined labor and the communication of ideas man 
was enabled so to protect and perhaps to fortify his cave dwelling 
that the species acquired its characteristic of slow development. 
The young hare, brought forth in a tuft of grass, can see and run 
as soon as born. The young rabbit, born in a safe burrow, is 
bhnd and helpless for days. So cave-dweUing man acquired the 
habit, which he still possesses, of slower development from birth 
than any other creature, because in addition to the natural safety 
of his dwelling he had learned the art of protecting it, by com^ 
bination and distribution of work, against all enemies. The 
tool of utility he learned to use as an implement for the adornment 
of himself and his belongings. He scratched the outlines of the 
beasts he had slain upon the weapon that slew them ; he decked 
himself and his mate in their spoils. His powerful canine teeth 
decreased, the useless hair upon his body disappeared, the multi- 
plying problems of his many acquired habits developed his 
powers of thought ; and when he strode forth from his cave and 
viewed the animal and vegetable world around him, he felt that 
he was their king. Looking deeper and deeper, year by year, 
into the mysteries of the world around him, he has learned the 
'why' of many things; and the complement of the 'why' is 

V [r9] 



THE BEGINNINGS 

always the 'because.' AiOTif he follows in thought the trail of 
the ' because' as far back as his mind will carry him, he comes to 
a point whence he can dimly discern the outline of his first 
. father, scarcely breaking the horizon of the sHmy past, a micro- 
scopic dab of mud. 



l20] 



VI 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

ITS CHEMICAL CREATION BY SCIENCE" 

BY 

PROFESSOR JOHN BUTLER BURKE 

OP CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 



/ 



'F the imaging forth of manh origin and development he a 
marvel of the infinitely great, we approach now a marvel 
of the infinitely minute. Modern science seeks to create life 
itself, to understand it as a natural, perhaps a chemical, process, 
and to set in motion the physical conditions which produce it — 
produce it through conjunctions and harmonies of atoms, too 
delicate, too evanescent for sight or for full comprehension. It 
were well to emphasize this point, for it has been much mis- 
understood. No scientist pretends to understand life, or, in the 
broader sense, to create it. He merely imitates; he investigates 
the conditions from the midst of which life may arise, and seeks 
to reproduce these so that some day he may see an organism, a 
being, appear before him, sprung not from preceding life-forms 
but from inorganic matter. 

Perhaps the thing is impossible. We have seen that in Mr. 
Robinson's address he could not forbear a sarcastic fiing at its 
absurdity. Yet so patient has been the investigation, so fasci- 
nating are its aims and its ideas, that no man can afford to shut 
the question wholly aside when engaged in an effort to under- 
stand our day. At the present m.oment the foremost of the in- 
vestigators of this subject is Mr. John Butler Burke, who here 
briefly explains what he and others have accomplished. 

The article is in a sense an abridgement of the author's recent 
elaborate volume upon the same subject. He belongs to the 
VI [I] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

younger generation 0} Engl^ scientists, being not yet forty. 
His lectures and investigations have, however, already won him 
fame, and placed him high among intellectual leaders. 

His explanations here are 0} necessity technical, far more 
technical than anything else that will appear in this series, and 
any one not possessed of at least a fair amount of chemical knowl- 
edge might better pass over most of the central part of the ad- 
dress, looking only to the opening to see the basis of Mr. Burke^s 
work, and then to the close to learn what the investigator be- 
lieves as to the result. 



The Editor offers me the opportunity to express my views 
upon the subject of those researches which have recently so 
much attracted the attention not merely of the scientific world 
but even of the world at large. Whether these experiments 
have the right to command all the interest they have evoked 
is a question which I myself feel rather diffident to answer. 
But that they have so aroused the enthusiam of all sorts and 
conditions of men compels me now to give utterance to what 
I do and do not think can legitimately be inferred from the 
facts I have observed; I feel it all the more beholden in 
me to express my indebtedness for the exceptional appreciation 
with which my efforts for some time past have been met from 
friends, and from all quarters. I do not think these experi- 
ments prove "spontaneous generation," if by this term is to 
be understood the appearance of life from the absolutely lifeless. 
Such a phenomenon, if it has ever taken place, and if it is even 
taking place around us, cannot, I fear, be proved to the satis- 
faction of all parties, and certainly not to that of those who have 
already made up their minds not to accept it. There may be, 
as they will again and again affirm — no matter to how high 
a temperature we may get — some secret source of energy. No 
matter how far we may trace the first beginnings of life, whether 
it is to the minutest microscopic cells, or to the atom itself, 
they would still maintain that the problem was not solved, and 
that in the atom itself is to be found the principle and the 
source of vital energy, and if this could be carried further they 
VI [2] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

would fall back upon the electron or even on the aether. In 
this respect they cannot, strictly speaking, it is true, be met 
by any contradiction. But their argument is of the nature 
of a metaphysical objection of the same kind as that which 
asserts the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. 
They admit of no answer, just as they admit of no proof, unless 
that proof be metaphysical, and unconvincing so far as its scien- 
tific aspect goes. I do not wish to be drawn into a quagmire if 
even in that quagmire I should discover what is true. The 
risk is too great, and our time is too short. There may be 
charms in groping in a bog, or in getting muddled, but for my 
part I prefer to keep out of it, at any rate so far as my investi- 
gations go. 

By spontaneous generation I mean the development of what 
we have a right to think is living from that which we have hither- 
to had a right to think was not. The development of living or- 
ganisms from inorganic matter would be without question 
quite a case in point. No doubt that inorganic substance 
may contain embedded in it some germ, or germs, hitherto 
unknown, and of a nature quite distinct from any we have yet 
had reason to regard as living; the substances employed may 
by their very nature, as it is here claimed — or, more accurately, 
suggested — have the principle of vital process, in an elementary 
form, as a part and parcel of their being. It is so with the dynam- 
ically unstable substances which of their own account mani- 
fest radio-activity. These dynamically unstable bodies have 
to some extent some of the properties of life — they disinte- 
grate, they decay, in their manifestations of that activity, but 
although this is merely analogy, and we must remember, as 
Darwin has well said, "Analogy is a deceitful guide"; still, if 
that analogy has prescribed or suggested results which have since 
been verified, its utility should have a greater claim to ouj 
attention than to be passed over with indifference and ignored. 
The products of radio-active bodies manifest not merely in- 
stability and decay but growth, subdivision, reproduction, and 
adjustm_ent of their internal functions to their surroundings, a 
circumstance which I think will be found to be equivalent to 
nutrition. Whether we are to regard these products, strictly 
VI [ 3 ] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

speaking, as living things is mc point which remains to be de- 
cided. We have to define their properties, and we have also 
to define life. 

Now their properties are as simple as they are well known, 
but before they are recapitulated here it would be well to repeat 
in outline one or two of the particulars which have led me to 
take up the line of argument I have ventured to pursue. 

By the action of radium upon bouillon, when sterilized so far 
as such experiments permit, microscopic bodies appear, already 
more than once described. In the first instance, they are 
not, as micro-organisms generally, or I should say always, are, 
more or less of the same size so long as they are of the same 
kind ; ordinary bacilli, provided they are of the same type, are 
found to be also of the same dimensions. They do not show 
signs which indicate that they have one and all sprung in a 
process of continuous growth from ultra-microscopic forms. 
But this is one of the characteristic features of the products now 
produced by radium. There can be no question that they spring 
— that in each case they have sprung — from the invisible, and 
grown to such a magnitude as to be seen. We find no such 
indication with ordinary bacteria. If these have not the marks 
of manufactured articles, they afford at least the signs of not 
having sprung spontaneously into existence. They bear the 
stamp of an inheritance of many varying qualities from a long 
and probably vaiying line of ancestors, of probably countless 
generations, which have at last made them what they are. But 
the " radiobcs " undergo many developments. After six or seven 
days, and at times even less, they develop nuclei; but later still 
they cease to grow, and then begin to segregate and multiply. 
These are some of the qualities which have led me to suppose 
that they are assimilative, and automatic, and not, strictly 
speaking, lifeless things. 

Their growth is no indication of vitality, for crystals not merely 
grow, but grow to such dimensions that in this point no living 
microscopic organism has any chance to rival them ; they, how- 
ever, do stop growing at some stage or another, else we should 
have, as some one has insisted, diamonds as large as Mount 
Etna or the Himalayas. This, however, does not seem to be the 
VI [4] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

point; when crystals reach their maximum dimensions, do they 
then throw off their superfluous particles and disintegrate them- 
selves ? In other words, do they show the cyclic process, pass 
into higher forms, and then decay, which is the test and the guar- 
antee of life? There are critics who will criticise without in 
the least trying to understand. Some indeed are merely literary 
hacks who pose before the world as judges of everything and 
anything they can get the chance to talk about. The stoppage 
of growth at a particular size, and of reproduction by fission or 
subdivision, and then the total disintegration of the cell, or 
whatever we may choose to call it, after its steady regular growth 
up to that point, is not merely suggestive of vitality, but in a 
certain sense, as it seems, it is vitality itself. It is an indication of 
self- nutrition and a very clear as well as an assuring one. The 
subdivision or fission which accompanies the cessation of devel- 
opment in the mechanism of adding to its size, shows the stage 
when there is a balance between the accumulation of energy and 
its expenditure. The bodies obtained by M. Stephane Lcduc in 
1902, by the action of potassium ferrocyanide on gelatine, or by 
allowing metallic salts to crystallize in gelatine and other colloidal 
solutions, do not exhibit all these primary or elementary proper- 
ties of living things ; they do not, in fact, manifest more than a 
resemblance in appearance to the cells or unit-forms of life. 
Their properties are not sufficient to justify the inference that 
they are living things, nor even that they possess to any marked 
extent any of the qualities that are associated with organic 
matter as it manifests vitality. On the other hand, it has 
been suggested that the "radiobes" (as I have ventured to 
designate them), if they are crystals, subdivide by cleavage 
under the influence of internal strain, as, for instance, South 
African diamonds are found occasionally to do. It all depends 
upon the nature of the segregation whether it is like a fission 
or a cleavage. Photographs show this most distinctly as 
it occurs within fourteen days or so. The subdivision is clearly 
not of the nature of a cleavage. Neither is it, as has also been 
suggested, at all likely that these subdivisions resemble those 
obtained by Professor Biitschli of Heidelberg, by the action 
on soluble salts of such substances as olive oil, and the bodies 
VI [5] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

obtained by emulsion of these bodies in water which behave 
in some ways, or by their subdivisions, much as if they were 
elementary forms of living things. 

But here again it is upon the nature of the subdivisions that 
we must rest our assurance as to what these subdivisidns mean. 
The subdivisions are quite different from anything we should 
expect mere surface tension to effect, 

A close examination of the mode of segregation at once shows 
that the"cell, " if so we may call it, becomes divided into segments, 
much in the same way as ordinary yeast cells are well known to 
do. A sharp corner, which is not unusual in the part so segre- 
gated, seems incompatible with the proposed theory of some 
overbalance in the force of surface tension over the internal 
forces which tend to keep the body intact. Many minute bodies 
subdivide, but they thus subdivide in different ways. And the 
manner in which they are found to do this is as important, if 
not far more so, than the mere fact that they do so actually divide. 
Thus it may again and again be urged that there are many micro- 
scopic particles which are known to pass through some of the 
performances which our "radiobes" also do; but we have no 
knowledge of any bodies wMch. can do them all except those 
bodies which we know are living things. If a bacteriologist 
were told that the objects of his observations were not strictly 
living things because Biitschli had obtained bodies certainly 
quite lifeless which could perform many of the actions which 
his bacteria do — because Leduc had obtained other bodies 
which possess many other properties which his bacterial bodies 
have; that Le Bon, Schron, Quincke, Lehmann, Ostwald, 
and a host of others had also observed minute so-called liquid 
and organic bodies, some of which are, accurately speaking, 
crystals — that therefore microbes must be crystals, he w^ould 
reply, and very rightly so, that the argument was scarcely 
valid, and that here, at least, analogy was a deceitful guide. 
But the argument would not be worse than that of those who 
would assert that because certain things are not bacteria they 
therefore must be crj^stals. It has been suggested that the 
products of radium and bouillon are like the microscopic 
crystals described by those alreadv mentioned, and also by 
VI [6 ' 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

Schenck in his admirable little work which has recently been 
published/ But the bodies there described, some of which 
I have many times observed, I have never thought of classify- 
ing or identifying with the "plastide particles" in bouillon that 
I have styled " radiobes. " The two are totally distinct. One 
type, the smaller one, behave like bubbles, or, more accurately, 
like oily drops, possessing no indication whatsoever of an inter- 
nal structure other than that which we may associate with crys- 
talline forms. The larger ones are much too large, and show 
no signs of disintegration, but give the beautiful characteristic 
figures of crystals under the polariscope. Even the compara- 
tively small ones give, to some extent at least, some slight polar- 
iscope effects. But they are obviously, to anybody who has seen 
them, quite different from those which are brought about in the 
culture medium under the influence of radium. They do not 
stain— at least I have not found them to do so— as the radium 
bodies do, and they do not manifest any of the properties which 
have so attracted our attention with the latter. The two— at 
least so far as I can judge— are totally distinct— as distinct as 
coal is from potatoes. 

It will be urged— in fact it has been urged— that these bodies, 
if living, must be the result of imperfect sterilizations, and that 
the experiments of Pasteur completely proved that when sterili- 
zations are properly carried out life does not spring from lifeless 
matter. This sounds very simple, very clear, and very forcible. 
But has it really any bearing on the question as to whether radio- 
activity can afford the internal energy of vital processes ? Pasteur's 
experiments were on sterilized media not acted upon by sources 
of activity such as those which now form the subject of discus- 
sion. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the question 
as to whether radio-activity can afford the energy in dynamically 
unstable groupings placed in suitable surroundings, and which 
might afford in more complex aggregations the f.ux, so to speak, 
which constitutes the principle of life. I argue now for possibil- 
ities, and I say without fear or hesitation, that, whatever may be 
the aspect we should take of this conception, the bearing of. 
Pasteur's observations on this point is as remote as it is on the 
1 Kristallinische Flussigkcilcn und Flussigc Kristalle. 

VI [7] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



Rja 



question whether there are living bodies in Venus or in Mars. 
It is a matter about which I feel, without misgiving, that Pas- 
teur, Tyndall, and Huxley would have thought as strongly as 
myself that their efforts had no bearing whatsoever on the 
point at issue. 

Having cleared our minds on the subject of these previous 
experiments of thirty years ago, we may turn our attention more 
particularly to these new experiments themselves. 

In the course of my previous work on phosphorescence I was 
induced to try whether the molecular groupings which, it was 
supposed, were formed during phosphorescence, by exciting 
sources, could also be produced in other organic bodies, whether 
they become luminous or not so long as they are similarly acted 
upon. 

The first attempt was to bring about the condensation or for- 
mation of a complex aggregate round a nucleus, itself the seat of 
electro-magnetic disturbances, as in radio-active particles, that 
might set up an aggregation of molecules, probably of an un- 
stable kind, in its vicinity. 

The most promising step to take appeared to be to introduce 
some radium salt into a tube containing glycerine and then 
suddenly to cool the liquid by immersion in liquid air.* The 
lic{uid would thus have every opportunity of condensing round 
the ions embedded in the glycerine from the radium, and perhaps 
also the aggregates contemplated would have a similar oppor- 
tunity of being formed, by the intense electro-magnetic pulses 
set up, or possibly by some catalytic actions. Crystals of glycer- 

^ These experiments were made at the Cavendish Laboratory in 
October, 1904, and were exhibited to a host of people in Cambridge 
at the time. By a coincidence, M. R. Dubois, an eminent physiologist, 
shortly afterwards stated, in an inaugural address at Lyons last Novem- 
ber, that he had observed the production of similar bodies, which he 
called vaciiolidcs, by the action of radium on certain culture media. 
Up to the time of correcting the proofs of this article he has not, so 
far as I am aware, made any communication to any scientific journal 
on the subject. In abstracting my work for the Revue des I dees, July 
15, 1905, he refers to his speech and proposes to change the name of 
his vacuolides to eobes. He admits they are the same as radiobes. 

VI [8] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

ine were thus produced, but it was found that the radium was 
not necessary, the low temperature being sufficient to enable 
them to form. On being removed from the cooling chamber 
and allowed to stand at the ordinary temperature of the room, 
they rapidly disappeared in about five minutes or so. 

The experiment was also made with gelatine. Microscopic 
crystals were thus easily produced by immersion in liquid air, and 
the outward appearance of the colloid was greatly altered, as it 
became intensely opaque. 

Bouillon, which was carefully sterilized under pressure at a 
temperature from 130° to 140° with radium for about thirty 
minutes at a time, was also tried. It was found in this case that 
after two days a culture was growing on the surface of the gela- 
tine. Moreover, on repeating the experiment it was observed 
that the culture was still formed even when the tube was not 
frozen. 

This was most remarkable, but the obvious explanation ap- 
peared to be that the cultures were contaminations and the re- 
sult of imperfect sterilization. So the experiment was repeated 
with controls. The result was precisely the same as before, in 
the tube containing radium, while the control tube showed no 
sign whatever of contamination. The radium was mixed with 
the gelatine medium in most of the experiments; in some, how- 
ever, it was contained in another and smaller tube close to the 
surface of the gelatine, or in a side tube. In all the experiments 
which may be regarded as reliable, actual contact seemed to be 
necessary, although at first it seemed as though the a-rays were 
sufficient. But in all such cases some of the radium actually 
got to the gelatine during the process of sterilization. 

In the earlier experiments the salt used was the chloride. It 
was sprinkled on a narrow glass slide over which a thin layer of 
gum was spread. The cultures were obtained only when the 
edge of the glass slide came in contact with the gelatine. 

On looking up the matter I found that it was a well-known fact 
that gum acted on gelatine in such a manner as to produce oily 
drops.^ Controls with gum alone, however, proved that the two 
effects were entirely different, the gum globules being confined 

^ See Article "Gum," Encyclopcedia Britannica. 9th Edition. 
VI [9] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

chiefly to the surface, disappearing altogether after some days, 
while the radium effect increased. 

Thus it seemed quite clear from these control experiments 
that the gum was not the cause of the culture-like appearances, 
while subsequent experiments with pure radium salt proved this 
beyond doubt. 

The next step was to get sub-cultures by inoculation in fresh 
media. The sub-cultures did not show the slightest signs of 
growth for nearly six weeks. They then, however, did manifest 
a tendency towards development, but only to a very small 
extent. 

Thus it is at once evident that the original cultures were not 
bacteria. 

The first experiments were repeated with radium bromide. 
About 2 J milligrammes of the salt contained in a small glass 
tube, one end of which was drawn out to a fine point, were intro- 
duced into an ordinary test-tube containing bouillon. The 
test-tube was plugged with cotton-wool in the usual way with 
such experiments, and then sterilized at a temperature of 130° 
C. for about thirty minutes at a time. On cooling, as soon as 
the liquid had coagulated, the fine end of the inner tube con- 
taining the radium was broken by means of a wire hook in a side 
tube. The salt was thus allowed to drop on the surface of the 
gelatine. After twenty-four hours signs of growth were already 
visible. On opening the tube and examining the culture micro- 
scopically the same results w^re obtained as previously. 

Their appearance is indeed most striking. It is curious, 
however, that with the bromide the cultures, although produced 
more rapidly, did not spread far into the interior of the gelatine, 
as did those due to the chloride. 

It is noteworthy that the consistency with which they appear, 
and their form at each stage of development, are not the least 
striking feature of their many characteristics. At first their 
appearance is that of diplococci ; yet it will be observed that they 
are not all of the same size, but vary considerably through a 
considerable range from 0.3/^. * to mere specks, as seen in yV 

^ fL is the one-thousandth of a miUimetre, or the twenty-five- 
thousandth of an inch. 

VI [10] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

inch power. There is an indication of growth and of their hav- 
ing originated from uhra-microscopic particles. 

At first they looked like crystals of carbonate of lime, but 
these are so very much larger and are visible with much lower 
powers. The latter are insoluble, while the former are 
soluble in warm water, so that the two cannot be identified. 
They might have been soluble phosphates, but the considera- 
tions which follow indicate that they are highly complicated 
structures and more like organisms. 

The polariscope does not give the figures and changes of 
color which are the characteristic features of a crystal. There is, 
however, a left-handed rotation imparted to the gelatine, and 
one which can easily be detected when the culture has penetrat- 
ed some distance into the interior, the rotation amounting to 
several degrees in a centimetre thickness. Thus they appear 
to be more of the nature of colloided bodies, but like bacteria 
with an asymmetric structure. 

The very minute quantity which could be experimented 
with rendered it extremely difficult to investigate their chemical 
composition; but the method of prolonged observation, like 
the astronomical method in matters over which we have no con- 
trol, enables us to study their structure and behavior, and to 
decide the question as to whether they are crystalline or or- 
ganized and living forms. 

Upon this point, however, it is necessary that the use of 
the word "crystal" should stand for some definite thing. By 
a crystal I mean an aggregate of symmetrically arranged groups 
of molecules. Such aggregates are known to grow by piling 
up, as it were, one on to another. They grow by accretion, not 
by assimilation, from their environment. Sachs* regarded 
protoplasm as made up of minute crystals, but that seems 

^Physiology of Plants, p. 206. His view that protoplasm is an 
organized substance consisting of crystalline, doubly refracting 
molecules (Micellas) is now generally accepted. In the moist state 
each of these (Micellae) is surrounded with an envelope of water in 
consequence of its powerful attraction. In their dry state they are 
in mutual contact. This theory of the internal structure of organized 
bodies was founded by Naegeli. 

VI [11] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

perhaps to be using the word in a somewhat clastic sense, if 
protoplasm, a colloid substance, were to be included amongst 
crystalline bodies. 

If colloidal bodies are aggregates of minute crystals, they are, 
however, not symmetrically arranged crystals, and the aggregate 
is not isomorphous with the constituent crystals, but on the 
whole amorphous. 

An organism has a structure, a nucleus, and an external 
boundary or cell-wall, and its vitality may be described as 
being a continuous process of adjustment between its internal 
and its external relations. 

Now a clear examination of the bodies produced by the 
action of radium on culture media will enable us to decide 
under which of these two heads these bodies come. 

The earlier stage does not reveal any structure, but later on 
the existence of a nucleus of a highly organized body is dis- 
tinctly shown; whilst after a while the segregation effects of 
growth and development, which it would appear rule crystals 
out of court, become distinctly marked. In such large bodies 
a satellite or offspring is usually visible and is suggestive of 
reproduction. 

This subdivision is the most striking thing about them, 
and a clear idea of its actual nature cannot fully be derived 
from the photographs. When the body exceeds yj. there is 
a tendency for it to divide up, and each part to lead a separate 
existence. 

The growth is from the minutest visible speck to two dots, 
then a dumb-bell shaped appearance, later more like frog's 
spawn, and so on through various stages until it reaches a 
shape largely different from its previous forms, when it divides 
and loses its individuality, and ultimately becomes resolved 
into minute crystals, possibly of uric acid. This is a develop- 
ment which no crystal has yet been known to make, and forces 
upon the mind the idea that they must be organisms; the fact, 
however, that they are soluble in water seems, on the other hand, 
to disprove the suggestion that they can be bacteria. But the 
stoppage of growth and the subdivision at a certain stage of 
development in such circumstances as these is a clear indi- 

VI [ 12 ] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

cation of the continuous adjustment of internal to external re- 
lations of the individual with its surroundings, and thus sug- 
gests vitality. 

The continuity of structure, assimilation, and growth, and 
then subdivision, together with the nucleated structure as 
shown in a few of the best specimens, suggests that they are en- 
titled to he classed among living things, in the sense in which 
we use the words, whether we call them bacteria or not. 

As they do not possess all the properties of bacteria, they are 
not what are understood by this name, and are obviously alto- 
gether outside the beaten track of living things. This, however, 
will not prevent such bodies from coming under the realm of 
biology, and, in fact, they appear to possess many of the qualities 
and properties which enable them to be placed in the borderland 
between crystals and bacteria, organisms in the sense in which 
we have employed the word, and possibly the missing link be- 
tween the animate and inanimate. May it not also be the 
germ which, after countless generations, under gradually chang- 
ing forms and in suitable environments, has at length evolved 
into a bacillus at which we gaze and gaze with hopeless won- 
der and amazement, each time we view it in the microscope 
to-day ? 

In their properties they are so like bacteria and yet not of 
them, nor of crystals, from both of which they differ widely, 
that they may with advantage, as we have said, be called 
Radiohes, a name at once suggestive both of their nature and 
their origin. 

Thus the gap, apparently insuperable, between the organic and 
the inorganic world seems, however roughly, to be bridged over 
by the presence of these radio-organic organisms which at least 
may give a clew as to the beginning and the end of life, "that 
vital putrefaction of the dust," to which Dr. Saleeby has recently 
drawn attention. 

Rainey obtained many curious results with salts of lime, but 
some of his observations may have been due to microbes, as in 
those days sufficient attention was not paid to the process of 
sterilization, while crystals of lime would be insoluble in water. 

Schenck's crystals, however, can be examined in the polari- 
VI [ 13 ] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



W 



scope, and do not segregate and reproduce as the bodies we are 
dealing with invariably have been found to do. 

]\Iay it not be that, among those unknown processes 
which, as Huxley expected, worked in the "remote prodigious 
vista of the past," where he could find no record of the com- 
mencement of life, the process now considered almost a univer- 
sal one, of radio-activity, performed those reactions, that we 
now see taking place in gelatine cultures, slowly and yet spon- 
taneously by virtue of even slightly radio-active bodies?^ 

The earth itself, which is slightly radio-active, should act 
likewise, and the substances required are the ingredients for the 
formation of radio-organisms. 

The only process taking place in matter which has since then 
revealed a hidden source of energy, not destroyed by heat, is 
radio-activity. 

Whether the lowliest forms of life — so simple that the sim- 
plest amceba as we see it to-day would appear a highly complex 
form — whether such elementary types have arisen from inorganic 
matter by such processes as I have described, I know not. 
IVIay it not be, however, and does it not seem probable, in the 
light of these experiments, that the recently discovered processes 
of instability and decay of inorganic matter, resulting from the 
unexpected source of energy which gives rise to them, are 
analogous in many ways to the very inappropriately called 
"vital force" or really vital energy of living mater? For this 
idea such physiologists as Johannes Miiller so devoutly pleaded 
more than half a century ago. And may they not also be the 
source of life upon this planet ? 

Cannot this instability and decay of inorganic matter of 
atoms of highly complex structure, in suitable environments, 
be the seat of disturbances, of fermentations, and of metabo- 
lisms ? The building up and breaking down through catalytic 
actions of great complex aggregates, not merely of stable crystal- 
line forms, but of unstable dynamical aggregations, imparted 
by the unstable atom of a radio-active substance to the agglom- 
erated mass? 

The results of these investigations of which I have given an 
account, although not affording an answer to this question, by 
VI [ 14 ] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 

giving rise to organisms such as bacteria (for it must be borne in 
mind that these are the descendants of countless generations, 
under gradually varying conditions), still afford beyond doubt 
organic forms of matter, as appears from their structure and 
behavior, even if they are not crystals or bacteria of the types 
already known, and place also at our disposal a method of 
structural organic synthesis, of which the chemist, perhaps, has 
not hitherto made use with effect. 

When working some time ago at the phosphorescent glow in 
gases, I was led from various considerations to infer that the 
luminosity was the result of great complex molecular agglom- 
erations produced by the spark. The duration of the life- 
period, if I might so call it, of those molecular groups is greatly 
increased by letting them diffuse into another tube through 
which the spark had not previously been sent,^ 

The effect of glycerine and gelatine on phosphorescent 
liquids is also known to increase the duration of the luminosity, 
and this is probably due to diminution of the number of colli- 
sions. I thus endeavored to observe the effect upon the phosphor- 
escent molecules by introducing glycerine or gelatine into a 
vacuum tube, immediately after sending a discharge of elec- 
tricity through it, while the phosphorescent glow lasted. 

If the glycerine or gelatine on being introduced is shaken 
inside the tube, some of the phosphorescent molecules would 
be caught by the liquid, which in turn should become phos- 
phorescent. The cyanogen molecules, it was thought, would 
do this particularly on account of their persistent nature after 
the passage of the discharge. Bouillon,^ which had been steri- 
lized with the tube itself before being introduced, w^as also 
among the substances employed. The vapor, however, from 
these substances when in the liquid state was enough to prevent 
the phosphorescent molecules which could exist at low pressure 
from persisting, and thus the experiments for the time were 
dropped. 

It seemed to me that the complex molecules of para-cyano- 

^ Philosophical Magazine, March, 1901. 

2 In this particular case it was the substance used for cultivating 
photogenic micro-cocci. 

VI [15] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



)RI< 



gen, unstable, but at the same time persistent and yielding 
a vast store of energy in their disintegration, might act as nuclei 
which would in suitable media set up catalytic activity, and 
thus act as a means of synthesizing complex organic com- 
pounds, a method not hitherto employed. It was for this reason 
that bouillon, of the composition used in the experiments with 
radium, was employed, since it contained all the constituents 
of protoplasm, and it seemed at the time quite possible, not 
to say probable, that the physical properties of the cyanogen 
molecule, as well as its chemical properties, justified the very 
shrewd conception of Pfluger, that the molecule of cyanogen 
is a'semi-living thing. 

The fundamental difference between living proteid as it 
constitutes living substance, and dead proteid as it occurs in 
egg-albumen, is in the self-decomposition of the former and 
the stable constitution of the latter. 

Verworn says: "The starting-point for further considera- 
tion is afforded by the fact that of the heterogeneous decompo- 
sition products of living proteid such as uric acid, creatin, and, 
moreover, the nuclein bases, guanin, xanthin, hypoxanthin, 
and adenin, a part contains cyanogen as a radical, and a part 
like urea, the most important of all the decomposition products 
of living proteid, can be produced artificially from cyanogen 
compounds by a rearrangement of the atoms." "This points 
strongly," he thinks, "to the probability that living proteid 
contains the radical cyanogen, and thus differs fundamentally 
from dead or food proteid." Thus, according to Pfluger, "in 
the formation of cell substance, i.e., of living proteid out of 
food proteid, a change in the latter takes place, the atoms of 
nitrogen going into a cyanogen-like relation with the atoms 
of carbon, probably with the absorption of a considerable 
amount of heat." Cyanogen is a radical which contains a 
vast amount of energy, and, although not to be compared with 
that of radium compounds, its potential store is nevertheless very 
great, as appears from thermal investigations. Again, "the 
idea that it is the cyanogen especially that confers upon the living 
proteid molecule its characteristic properties is supported es- 
pecially by many analogies that exist between living proteid and 
VI [i6] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

the compounds of cyanogen. Thus a product of the oxidation 
of cyanogen, cyanic acid, H.C.N.O., possesses great similarity 
to living protcid. Pfliigcr calls attention to the following 
interesting points of comparison: (i) Both bodies grow by 
polymerization by chemically combining similar molecules, 
like chains, into masses; the growth of living substance takes 
place thus, and in this way also the polymeric HuCnNnOn 
comes from cyanic acid, H.C.N.O. (2) Further, both bodies 
in the presence of water are spontaneously decomposed into 
carbonic acid and ammonia. (3) Both afford urea by disso- 
ciation, i.e., by intramolecular rearrangement, not by direct 
oxidation. (4) Finally, both are liquid and transparent at 
low temperatures and coagulate at higher ones; cyanic acid 
earlier, living proteid later." "Their similarity," says Pfliigcr, 
" is so great that I might term cyanic acid a half-living molecule." 

Pfliiger's analyses have not met, to say the least of it, with 
widespread recognition. Further experimental confirmation 
is doubtless necessary before they can be ranked as theory. 

The dynamical nature of the cyanogen molecule, however, 
together with the large store of potential energy it contains, con- 
stitutes the resemblance between it and radium compounds, 
but it must be borne in mind that the internal energy thus 
manifested by the molecular disintegration is of an entirely 
different order of magnitude. Nevertheless, there is a sufficient 
resemblance between the two to utilize each for the purpose 
of the experiments we have in view. Then the molecule of 
either might act as a nucleus which should by catalysis, or 
some other means, set up dynamically unstable groups, which, 
though not living in the sense that they possessed the n qualities 
of living proteid, may, by possessing (w-i) of those qualities, 
be regarded as a mode of life in the sense in which many philoso- 
phers have used the word. If cyanogen is a half-living thing, 
as Pfliiger supposed for the reason we have given, it is only 
natural to try if it would form growths in culture media, and 
the use of bouillon in my experiments was merely the logical 
outcome of this conception. 

It seems quite beyond hope that even if we had the materials 
and conditions for producing life in the laboratory we should be 
VI [ 17 ] 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



■^ 



able to produce forms of life as developed as even the simplest 
amoeba, for the one reason, if for no other, that these are the 
descendants of almost an indefinite series of ancestors. But it is 
not beyond hope to produce others, more elementary ones, arti- 
ficially; and the micro-organisms — I think I am justified in 
calling them such — which form the subject of this article, al- 
though not bacteria, still may be looked upon as approximating 
to these more closely, and certainly regarded as higher in the 
scale of being than any forms of crystalline or colloid bodies 
hitherto observed. 



VI [i8] 



VII 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

"THE MORALITY OF NATURE" 

BY 

PRINCE KROPOTKTN 



TN our own day^ the old distinction between scientist and 
philosopher bids fair to become extinct. Time was when 
the scientist confined himselj to exact experiment and the discovery 
of the physical laws which underlay his results, while the philoso- 
pher took the universe for his province and speculated upon its 
meaning. Now, however, each invades the other^s realm; the 
scientist theorizes on origin and cause; the philosopher adopts 
scientific methods. Somewhere in the borderland between the two, 
lies the following address. It attempts to discover the origin of 
society, the explanation of altruism, the reason why a man is in- 
sufficient for himself and desires the company of others, feels both 
the joy and suffering of others in addition to his own. 

Here again it is obvious that we do but strive to push a little 
further from us the mystery of our being. Even were the search of 
science successful, so that she could set her finger on a point and 
date, and say, here began the social instinct in man, from this it has 
developed — even then the marvel would stand as it stands now, not 
in the method of development, but in the fact that this social in- 
stinct exists, that it has been created. 

Nevertheless, it may be well to caution our readers that in this 
interweaving of science and philosophy, the scientist is apt to carry 
through his philosophic excursions the forms of expression, the 
posiliveness of assertion, which belong properly to his experi- 
mental work. Hence when, in one of the few essays our series 
gives of necessity to science, the writer states a fact of the present 
vn [i] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

time, which he has seen or tried, we may accept him jully; but 
when from this jact he injers something that occurred ceons ago, we 
must grow cautious. For each positive ^^is'^ it were wise to sub- 
stitute the more modest "seems," for "proves" let us read "sug- 
gests," or at the most "makes probable." Scientists themselves 
would be the readiest to approve this caution. -True science has no 
more deadly enemy than over-sureness. The possibility oj lurking 
error, or oj new and unknown causes working to confuse results, is 
ever in the seekefs mind. 

In the present address Darwinism, already introduced to the 
reader, presents its most recent thoughts, and presents them in the 
words oj one oj its most noted exponents. Prince Kropotkin is the 
most widely known oj Russian scientists. He is also a leader in 
the discussion oj social problems. To Americans his career may 
he less jajniliar than it is in Europe. Born oj a vice-regal jamily 
in Russia, he was educated among the pages oj the imperial court; 
but a more vigorous lije attracted him, and he became an explorer 
and geographer amid the wilds oj Siberia. Later he took part in 
the Russian revolutionary movement, and joined the International 
Working Men's Association (1872). He was imprisoned and 
escaped, to become an anarchistic leader throughout Europe. As 
such, he was expelled jrom Switzerland. Even in republican 
France he was held three years in prison; and it was not till 1886 
that he settled to the more quiet existe?ice oj a litterateur a«(^ scientist. 
In I goo he published his " Memoirs oj a Revolutionist," which has 
been translated into every leading language; and in igo2 he pub- 
lished his important treatise on "Mutual Aid in Evolution," to 
which he makes jrequent rejerence below. 



The work of Darwin was not limited to biology only.* 
Already in 1837, when he had just written a rough outhne of his 
theory of the origin of species, he entered in his note-book this 
significant remark: 'My theory will lead to a new philosophy.' 

1 In his History of Modern Philosophy the Danish professor, Harald 
Hoffding, gives an admirable sketch of the philosophical importance of 
Darwin's work. Gcsckichte der ncucrcn Philosophic, German transla- 
tion by F. Bendixen (Leipsic, 1896), Vol. II., p. 487 et seq. 

vn [2] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

And so it did in reality. The application which he made of the 
idea of evolution to the whole of organic life marked a new era in 
philosophy; and it led him later on to write a sketch of the de- 
velopment of the moral sense, which opened a new page in ethics. 
In this sketch so much was done to throw a new- light upon the 
true and efficient cause of the moral feelings, and place the whole 
of ethics on a scientific basis, that although Darwin's leading 
ideas may be considered as a further development of those of 
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, his work represents, nevertheless, a 
new departure, on the lines faintly indicated by Bacon. It 
secured, therefore, for its author a place by the side of the other 
founders of ethical schools, such as Hume, Hobbes, or Kant. 

The leading ideas of Darwin's ethics may easily be summed 
up. In the very first sentences of his essay he states his object in 
quite definite terms. He begins with a praise of the sense of 
duty, which he characterizes in the well-known poetical words of 
Kant : * Duty! Wondrous thought that workest neither by fond 
insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, . . .' etc. And he 
undertakes to explain this sense of duty, or moral conscience, 
'exclusively from the side of natural history' — an explanation, 
he adds, which no English writer had hitherto attempted to give.* 
That the moral sense should be acquired by each individual 
separately, during its lifetime, he naturally considers ' at least 
extremely improbable on the general theory of evolution ' ; and 
he derives this sense from the social feelings which are instinctive 
or innate in the lower animals, and probably in man as well. 
The origin and the very foundation of all moral feelings Darwin 
sees ' in the social instincts which lead the animal to take pleasure 
in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy 
with them, and to perform various services for them ' ; sympathy 
being understood here in its proper sense — not as a feeling of 
commiseration or love, but as a 'fellow-feeling' or 'mutual sensi- 
bility ' ; the fact of being influenced by another's feelings. 

This being Darwin's first proposition, his second is that as 
soon as the mental faculties of a species become highly developed 
as they are in man, the social instinct will necessarily lead, as 
every other unsatisfied instinct does, to a sense of dissatisfaction, 

1 The Descent of Alan, chap IV. 

vn [3] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

or even misery, as often as the individual, reasoning about its past 
actions, sees that in some of them 'the enduring and always 
present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the 
time stronger, but neither enduring nor leaving behind it a very 
vivid impression.' For Darwin the moral sense is thus not the 
mysterious gift of unknown origin which it was for Kant. ' Any 
animal whatever,' he says, 'endowed with well-marked social 
instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, 
would inevitably acquire a moral sense, or conscience [Kant's 
"knowledge of duty"], as soon as its intellectual powers had 
become as well, or nearly as well, developed as in man. 

To these two fundamental propositions Darwin adds two 
secondary ones. After the power of language had been acquired, 
and the wishes of the community could be expressed, 'the com- 
mon opinion how each member ought to act for the public good 
would naturally become, in a paramount degree, the guide of 
action.' However, the effect of public approbation and dis- 
approbation depends entirely upon the development of mutual 
sympathy. It is because we feel in sympathy with others that 
we appreciate their opinions; and public opinion acts in a 
moral direction only where the social instinct is sufficiently 
strongly developed. This is evidently an important remark, 
because it refutes those theories of Mandeville and his more or 
less outspoken eighteenth-century followers, w^hich represented 
morality as nothing but a set of conventional manners. Finally, 
Darwin mentions habit as a potent factor for framing our con- 
duct. It strengthens the social instinct and mutual sympathy, 
as also obedience to the judgment of the community. 

Having thus stated the substance of his views in four definite 
propositions, Darwin gives them some further developments. 
He examines, first, sociability in animals, their love of society, 
and the misery which every one of them feels if it is left alone; 
their continual intercourse ; their mutual warnings, and the ser- 
vices they render each other in hunting and for self-defence. 
'It is certain,' he says, 'that associated animals have a feeling of 
love for each other which is not felt by non-social adult animals.' 
They may not much sympathize with each other's pleasures, but 
cases of sympathy with each other's distress or danger are quite 

VII [ 4 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

common, and Darwin quotes a few of the most striking instances. 
Some of them, such as Saintsbury's blind pelican or the blind rat, 
both of which were fed by their congeners, have become classical 
by this time, while several similar illustrations have been added 
since. 'Moreover, beside love and sympathy,' Darwin con- 
tinues, 'animals exhibit other qualities connected with social 
instincts which in us would be called moral,' and he gives a few 
examples of moral self-restraint in dogs and elephants. Alto- 
gether, it is evident that every action in common — and with cer- 
tain animals it is quite habitual — requires some restraint of the 
same sort. However, it must be said that Darwin did not treat 
the subject of sociabiHty in animals and their incipient moral 
feeHngs with all the developments which it deserved, in view of 
the central position which it occupies in his theory of morality. 

Considering next human morahty, Darwin remarks that 
although man, such as he now exists, has but few special in- 
stincts, he nevertheless is a sociable being who must have re- 
tained from an extremely remote period some degree of instinc- 
tive love and sympathy for his fellows. These feelings act as an 
impulsive instinct, which is assisted by reason, experience, and 
the desire of approbation. 'Thus the social instincts, which 
must have been acquired by man in a very rude state, and prob- 
ably even by his ape-hke progenitors, still give the impulse for 
some of his best actions.' The remainder is the result of a 
steadily growing intelligence and collective education. 

It is evident that these views are correct only if we are ready 
to recognize that the intellectual faculties of animals differ from 
those of man in degree, but not in their essence. But this is ad- 
mitted now by most students of comparative psychology; and 
the attempts which have been made lately to establish ' a gulf ' 
between the instincts and the intellectual faculties of man 
and those of animals have not attained their end.^ How- 

^ The incapacity of an ant, a dog, or a cat to make a discovery, or to 
hit upon the correct solution of a difficulty, is not proof of an essential 
difference between the intelligence of man and that of these animals, 
because the same want of inventiveness is continually met with in men 
as well. Like the ant in one of Lubbock's experiments, thousands of 
men who had not been already familiar with bridges would spend their 
forces in the effort of crossing a brook or a ravine, before they would 
try to bridge it. And, on the other hand, the collective intelligence of 

vn [ 5 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

ever, it docs not follow from this resemblance that the moral 
instincts developed in different species, and the less so in 
species belonging to two different classes of animals, should 
be identical. If we compare insects with mammals, we 
must never forget that the lines of their development have 
diverged at a very early period of animal evolution. The 
consequence was that a deep physiological differentiation be- 
tween separate portions of the same species took place with the 
ants, the bees, the wasps, etc., corresponding to a permanent 
physiological division of labor between their females, their males, 
and their workers — a division of which there is no trace among 
mammals. Therefore it seems almost impossible to ask men to 
judge of the morality of the worker- bees when they kill the males 
in their hive ; and this is why the illustration of Darwin to this 
effect met with so much hostile criticism. And yet the moral 
conceptions of man and the actions of insects have so much in 
common that the greatest ethical teachers of mankind did not 
hesitate to recommend certain features of the ants and the bees 
for imitation by man. Their devotion to the group is certainly 
not surpassed by ours; and, on the other hand — to say nothing 
of our race wars, or of the occasional exterminations of religious 
dissidents and political adversaries — the human code of morality 
has undergone such variations in the course of time as to pass 
from the exposure of children by savages in years of scarcity, and 
the ' wound-f or- wound and lif e-f or-lif e ' principle of the Deca- 
logue, to the profound respect of everything that lives preached 
by Bodisatta and the pardon of offences practised by the early 
Christians. We are thus bound to conclude that while the dif- 
ferences between the morality of the bee and that of man are due 
to a deep physiological divergence, the striking similarities be- 
tween the two point, nevertheless, to a community of origin. 

The social instinct is thus, in Darwin's opinion, the common 
stock, out of which all moraUty originates; and he further 

an ant's nest or a beehive — one individual in the thousand hitting upon 
the correct solution, and the others imitating it — solves difficulties 
much greater than those upon which the individual ant, or bee, or cat 
has so ludicrously failed. The bees at the Paris Exhibition, and their 
devices to prevent being disturbed in their work, or any one of the well- 
known facts of inventiveness among the bees, the ants, the wolves 
hunting together, are instances in point. — K. 

VII [ 6 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

analyzes this instinct. Unfortunately, scientific animal psychol- 
ogy is still in its infancy, and therefore it is extremely difficult to 
disentangle the complex relations which exist between the social 
instinct, properly so-called, and the parental and fihal instincts, 
as well as several other instincts and faculties, such as sympathy, 
reason, experience, and a tendency to imitation. Darwin felt 
this difficuhy very much, and therefore he expressed himself 
extremely cautiously. The parental and fihal instincts, he sug- 
gested, ' apparently lie at the base of the social instincts' : and in 
another place he wrote: 'The feehng of pleasure from society is 
probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the 
social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for 
a long time with their parents.' 

This caution was fully justified, because in other places he 
pointed out that the social instinct must be a separate instinct in 
itself, different from the others— an instinct which has been de- 
veloped by natural selection for its own sake, as it was useful for 
the well-being and the preservation of the species. It is so 
fundamental that when it runs against another instinct, even one 
so strong as the attachment of the parents to their offspring, it 
often takes the upper hand. Birds, when the time has come for 
their autumn migration, will leave behind their tender young, not 
yet old enough for a prolonged flight, and follow their comrades. 

To this striking illustration I may also add that the social 
instinct is strongly developed with many lower animals, such as 
the land- crabs, or the Molucca crab ^ ; as also with certain fishes, 
with whom it hardly could be considered as an extension of the 
fihal or parental f eehngs. In these cases it appears rather as an 
extension of the brotherly or sisterly relations, or feelings of com- 
radeship, which probably develop eacli time that a considerable 
number of young animals, having been hatched at a given place 
and at a given moment, continue to live together— whether they 
are with their parents or not. It would seem, therefore, more 
correct to consider the social and the parental instincts as two 
closely connected instincts, of which the former is perhaps the 
earlier, and therefore the stronger, and which both go hand in 
hand in the evolution of the animal world. Both are favored 
^SeeMuttialAid, 1903, pp. 11 and 12. 

VII [7] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

by natural selection, which, as soon as they come into conflict, 
keeps the balance between the two, for the ultimate good of the 
species.* 

The most important point in the ethical theory of Darwin is, 
of course, his explanation of the moral conscience of man and his 
sense of remorse and duty. This point has always been the 
stumbling-block of all ethical theories. Kant, as is known, 
utterly failed, in his otherwise so beautifully written work on 
morality, to establish why his ' categorical imperative ' should be 
obeyed at all, unless such be the will of a supreme power. We 
may admit that Kant's 'moral law,' if we slightly alter its for- 
mula, while we maintain its spirit, is a necessary conclusion of the 
himian reason. We certainly object to the metaphysical form 
which Kant gave it; but, after all, its substance is equity, justice. 
And, if we translate the metaphysical language of Kant into the 
concrete language of inductive science, we may find points of 
contact between his conception of the origin of the moral law and 
the naturalist's view concerning the development of the moral 
sense. But this is only one-half of the problem. Supposing, 
for the sake of argument, that 'pure reason,' free from all obser- 
vation, all feeling, and all instinct, in virtue of its inherent proper- 
ties, should necessarily come to formulate a law of justice similar 
to Kant's imperative, and granting that no reasoning being could 
ever come to any other conclusion, because such are the inherent 
properties of reason — granting all this, and fully recognizing at 
the same time the elevating character of Kant's moral philosophy, 
the great question of all ethics remains, nevertheless, in full: 
' Why should man obey the moral law, or principle, formulated 
by his reason ? ' Or, at least, ' Whence that feeling of obligation 
which men are experiencing ? ' 

Several critics of Kant's ethical philosophy have already 
pointed out that it left this great fundamental question unsolved. 

^In an excellent analysis of the social feeling {Animal Behaviour, 
1900, pp. 231-232) Professor Lloyd Morgan says: 'And this question 
Prince Kropotkin, in common with Darwin and Espinas, would prob- 
ably answer without hesitation that the primaeval germ of the social 
community lay in the prolonged coherence of the group of parents and 
offspring. ' I should only add the words : ' or of the offspring without the 
parents,' because this addition would better agree with the above facts, 
while it also more correctly renders the idea of Darwin. — K. 

VII [ 8 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

But they might have added also that Kant himself had recog- 
nized his incapacity of solving it. After having thought in- 
tensely upon this subject, and written about it for four years, he 
acknowledged in his Philosophical Theory of Religion (Part I., 
'Of the Radical Evil of Human Nature,' published in 1792) that 
he was unable to find the origin of the moral law. In fact, he 
gave up the whole problem by recognizing 'the incomprehensi- 
bility of this capacity, a capacity which proclaims a divine origin ' 
— this very incomprehensibiHty having to rouse man's spirit to 
enthusiasm and to strengthen it for any sacrifices which respect 
to his duty may impose upon him.^ 

Intuitive philosophy having thus acknowledged its incapac- 
ity to solve the problem, let us see how Darwin solved it from 
the point of view of the naturalist. Here is, he said, a man who 
has yielded to a strong sense of self-preservation, and has not 
risked his life to save that of a fellow- creature; or, he has stolen 
food from hunger. In both cases he has obeyed a quite natural 
instinct, and the question is, Why should he feel miserable at 
all ? Why should he think that he ought to have obeyed some 
other instinct, and acted differently? Because, Darwin replies, 
in human nature ' the more enduring social instincts conquer the 
less persistent instincts.' Moral conscience has always a retro- 
spective character; it speaks in us when we think of our past 
actions ; and it is the result of a struggle, during which the less 
persistent, the less permanent individual instinct yields before 
the more permanently present and the more enduring social in- 
stinct. With those animals which always live in society 'the 
social instincts are ever present and persistent.' Such animals 
are always ready to join in the defence of the group and to aid 
each other in different ways. They feel miserable if they are 
separated from the others. And it is the same with man. 'A 
man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be a mon- 
ster.' On the other hand, the desire which leads a man to 
satisfy his hunger or his anger, or to escape danger, or to appro- 
priate somebody's possessions, is in its nature temporary. Its 
satisfaction is always weaker than the desire itself. And when 
we think of it in the past, we cannot recall it as vividly as it was 

1 Hartleben's edition of Kant's works, Vol. VI., pp. 143, 144. 
VII [ 9 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

before its satisfaction. Consequently, if a man, with a view of 
satisfying such a desire, has acted so as to traverse his social in- 
stinct, and afterward reflects upon his action — which we con- 
tinually do — he will be driven ' to make a comparison between 
the impressions of past hunger, vengeance satisfied, or danger 
shunned at other men's cost, with the almost ever-present in- 
stinct of sympathy, and with his early knowledge of what others 
consider as praiseworthy or blamable.' And once he has made 
this comparison he will feel ' as if he had been baulked in follow- 
ing a present instinct or habit, and this with all animals causes 
dissatisfaction, or even misery.'' 

And then Darwin shows how the primary promptings of such 
a conscience, which always 'looks backward, and serves as a 
guide for the future,' m.ay take the aspect of shame, regret, re- 
pentance, or even violent remorse, if the feeling be supported by 
reflection about the judgment of those with whom man feels in 
sympathy. Later on, habit will necessarily increase the power of 
this conscience upon man's actions, while at the same time it will 
tend to harmonize more and more the desires and passions of the 
individual with his social sympathies and instincts.^ Altogether, 
the great difliculty for ethical philosophy is to explain the, first 
germs of the ' ought '—the appearance of the first whisper of the 
voice which pronounces that word. If that much has been ex- 
plained, the accumulated experience of the community and its 
collective teachings will explain the rest. 

We have thus, for the first time, an explanation of the sense of 

duty on a natural basis. True that it runs counter to the ideas 

that are current now about animal and human nature ; but it is 

correct. Nearly all ethical writers have hitherto started with the 

unproved postulate that the strongest of all the instincts of man, 

^ In a foot-note Darwin, with his usual deep insight, makes, however, 
one exception. 'Enmity, or hatred,' he remarks, 'seems also to be a 
highly persistent feeling, perhaps more so than any other that can be 
named. . . . This feeling would thus seem to be innate, and is cer- 
tainly a most persistent one. It seems to be the complement and con- 
verse of the true social instinct ' (foot-note 27). This feeling, so deeply 
seated in animal nature, evidently explains the bitter wars that are 
fought between different tribes or groups in several animal species and 
among men. It explains also the existence of two different codes of 
morality retained till now among civilized nations. Btit this important 
and yet neglected subject can better be treated in connection with the 
development of the idea of justice. — K. 

VU I 10 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

and the more so of animals, is the selj- preservation inslinct, which, 
owing to a certain looseness of their terminology, they have 
identified, in man, with self-assertion, or egoism properly speak- 
ing. This instinct, which they conceived as including, on the 
one side, such primary impulses as self-defence, self-preserva- 
tion, and the very act of satisfying hunger, and, on the other side, 
such derivative feehngs as the longing for domination, greed, 
hatred, the desire of revenge, and so on — this compound and 
heterogeneous aggregate of instincts and feelings they repre- 
sented as an all-pervading and all-powerful force, which finds no 
contradiction in animal and human nature, excepting in a cer- 
tain f eehng of benevolence or mercy. The consequence of such 
a view was that, once human nature was recognized as such, there 
obviously remained nothing but to lay a special stress upon the 
softening influence of those moral teachers who appealed to 
mercy, borrowing the spirit of their teachings and the impressive- 
ness of their words from a world that hes outside nature — outside 
and above the world which is accessible to our senses. And if 
one refused to accept this view, the only alternate issue was to 
attribute, as Hobbes and his followers did, a special importance 
to the coercive action of the State, inspired by genial law-givers — 
which meant, of course, merely to shift the extra-natural inspira- 
tion from the religious preacher to the law-maker. 

Beginning with the Middle Ages, the founders of ethical 
schools, for the most part ignorant of nature, to the study of 
which they preferred metaphysics, had represented the self- 
assertive instincts of the individual as the very condition of its 
physical existence. To obey their promptings was considered 
as the law of nature, the neglect of which would lead to a sure 
defeat and to the ultimate disappearance of the species. There- 
fore, to combat these egotistic promptings was possible only if 
man called to his aid the supernatural forces. The triumph of 
moral principles was thus represented as a triumph of man over 
nature, which he may hope to achieve only with an aid from 
without, coming as a reward for his humihty. They told us, for 
instance, that there is no greater virtue, no greater triumph of 
the spiritual over the natural, than self-sacrifice for the welfare of 
our fellow-men.. But the fact is that self-sacrifice in the interest 

VII [ II ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

of an ants' nest, for the safety of a group of birds, or the security 
of a drove of cattle, a herd of antelopes, or a band of monkeys, is 
a zoological fact oj every-day occurrence in Nature — a fact for 
which hundreds upon hundreds of animal species require nothing 
else but natural sympathy with their fellow-creatures, the sensa- 
tion of full vital energy, and a constant habit of mutual aid. 
Darwin, who knew nature, had the courage boldly to assert that 
of the two instincts — the social and the individual — it is the 
former which is the stronger, the more persistent, and the more 
permanently present. And he was right. The instinct of 
mutual aid pervades the animal world, because natural selection 
works for maintaining and further developing it, and pitilessly 
destroys those species which lose it. In the great struggle for 
life which every animal species carries on against the hostile 
agencies of climate, surroundings, and natural enemies, big and 
small, those species which most consistently carry out the prin- 
ciple of mutual support have the best chance to survive, while the 
others die out. And the same great principle is confirmed by the 
history of mankind. 

It is most remarkable that in representing the social instinct 
under this aspect we return, in fact, to what Bacon, the great 
founder of inductive science, had perceived. In his programme 
of the work to be done by the next generations with the aid of the 
inductive method, in The Great Instauration, he wrote: 

"All things are endued with an appetite for tvv^o kinds of good 
— the one as a thing is a whole in itself, the other as it is a part of 
some greater whole; and this latter is more worthy and more 
powerful than the other, as it tends to the conservation of a more 
ample form. The first may be called individual, or self-good, 
and the latter, good of communion. . . . And thus it generally 
happens that the conservation of the more general form regu- 
lates the appetites." * 

1 On the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, Book VII. chap. i. 
We certainly find Bacon's arguments in favor of this idea insufficient; 
but he was only establishing the outlines of a science, which had to be 
worked out by his followers. In another place he returns to the same 
idea. He speaks of 'two appetites [instincts] of the creatures,' (i) that 
of self-preservation and defence, and (2) that of multiplying and prop- 
agating, and he adds, ' The latter, which is active, seems stronger and 
more worthy than the former, which is passive.' — K. 

VII [12] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

It may be asked, of course, whether such a conception agrees 
with the theory of natural selection, according to which struggle 
for Uf e, within the species, was considered a necessary condition 
for the appearance of new species, and for evolution altogether ? 
Having already touched elsewhere upon this question, I will not 
enter here into its discussion, and will only add the following 
remark. Immediately after the appearance of Darwin's work 
on the origin of species we were all inclined to believe that an 
acute struggle for the means of existence between the members of 
the same species was necessary for accentuating the variations, 
and for the development of new species. But the deeper we go 
into the study of the facts of nature, and realize the direct influ- 
ence of the surroundings for producing variation in a definite 
direction, as also the influence of isolation upon portions of the 
species separated from the main body in consequence of their 
migrations, we are prepared to understand ' struggle for life ' in a 
much wider and deeper sense. We see more and more the group 
of animals, acting as a whole, carrying on the struggle against 
adverse conditions, or against some such an enemy as a kindred 
species, by means of mutual support within the group, and thus 
acquiring habits which reduce the struggle, while they lead at the 
same time to a higher development of intelhgence among those 
who took to mutual support. The above objection falls through 
in proportion as we advance in our knowledge of the struggle 
for Ufe. 

Nature has thus to be recognized as the first ethical teacher of 
man. The social instinct, innate in men as well as it is in all the 
sociable animals, is the origin of all ethical conceptions and all 
the subsequent ethical development. 



VTT [13] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 



II 

Primitive man lived in close intimacy with animals. With 
some of them he probably shared the shelters under the rocks, 
occasionally the caverns, and very often food. Not more than a 
hundred years ago the natives of Siberia and America astonished 
our naturalists by their thorough knowledge of the habits of the 
most retiring beasts and birds; but primitive man stood in still 
closer relations to the animals, and knew them still better. The 
wholesale extermination of life by means of forest and prairie 
fires, poisoned arrows, and the like, had not yet begun; and from 
the bewildering abundance of animal hf e which was found by the 
white settlers when they first took possession of the American 
continent we may judge of the density of the animal population 
during the early Post-glacial period. Palaeolithic and neohthic 
man lived closely surrounded by his dumb brothers — just as the 
shipwrecked crew of Behring lived amidst the multitudes of 
polar foxes, which were prowling in the midst of their encamp- 
ments and gnawing at night at the very furs upon which the men 
were sleeping. Our primitive ancestors lived with the animals, 
in the midst of them. And as soon as they began to bring some 
order into their observations of nature, and to transmit them to 
posterity, the animals and their fife supplied them with the chief 
materials for their unwritten encyclopaedia of knowledge, as well 
as for their wisdom, which they expressed in proverbs and say- 
ings. Animal psychology was the first psychology which man 
was aware of— it is still a favorite subject of talk at the camp- 
fires; and animal hfe, closely interwoven with that of man, was 
the subject of the very first rudiments of art, inspiring the first 
engravers and sculptors, and entering into the composition of 
the most ancient epical traditions and ccsmogonic myths. 

The first thing which our children learn in natural history is 
something about the beasts of prey — the lions and the tigers. 
But the first thing which primitive savages must have learned 
about nature was that it represents a vast agglomeration of 
animal clans and tribes: the ape tribe, so nearly related to man, 
the ever-prowling wolf tribe, the knowing, chattering bird tribe, 
the ever-busy insect tribe, and so on. For them the animals 

VII [ 14 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

were an extension of their own kin — only so much wiser than 
themselves. And the first vague generalization v/hich men must 
have made about nature — so vague as to hardly differ from a 
mere impression — was that the living being and his clan or tribe 
are inseparable. We can separate them — they could not; and 
it seems even doubtful whether they could think of life otherwise 
than within a clan or a tribe. 

Such an impression of nature was unavoidable. Among his 
nearest congeners — the monkeys and the apes — man saw hun- 
dreds of species living in large societies, united together within 
each group by the closest bonds. He saw how they supported 
each other during their foraging expeditions, how they combined 
against their common enemies, and rendered each other all sorts 
of small services, such as the picking of thorns from each other's 
fur, the nestling together in cold weather, and so on. Of course 
they often quarrelled, but there was more noise in these quarrels 
than serious harm, and at times, in case of danger, they displayed 
the m.ost striking mutual attachment, to say nothing of the 
strong devotion of the m.others to their young ones, which they 
have in common with all the animals. Sociability was thus the 
rule with the monkey tribe; and if there are now two species of 
big apes, the gorilla and the orang-outang, which are not sociable, 
and keep in small families only, the very hmited sizes of the areas 
they inhabit are a proof of their being now decaying species — 
decaying, perhaps, on account of the merciless war which men 
have waged against them in consequence of the very resemblance 
between the two species.^ 

Primitive man saw, next, that even among the carnivorous 
beasts, which hve by kiUing other animals, there is one general 
and invariable rule : They never kill each other. Some of them 
are very sociable^such are all the dog tribe: the jackals, the 
dholes or kholzun dogs, the hyenas. Some others prefer to live 
in small families; but even among these last the more inteUigent 
ones— the Uons and the leopards — occasionally join together for 
hunting, like the dog tribe. And as to those few which lead — 
nowadays, at least — a quite sohtary life in small f amihes, so that 
even the females with their cubs will often keep separate from the 

* Several African travellers speak of that enmity and signal its causes. 
VII [15] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

males, the same general rule of nature prevails among them* 
they do not kill each other. Even now, when the myriads of 
ruminants which formerly peopled the prairies have been exter- 
minated, and the tigers live mainly on man's herds, and are com- 
pelled, therefore, to keep close to the villages, every one to its own 
domain — even now the natives of India will tell us that some- 
how the tigers manage to keep to their separate domains without 
fighting bloody internecine wars for securing them. Besides, it 
appears extremely probable that even those few animals which 
now lead a sohtary existence — such as the tigers, the smaller 
species of the cat tribe (nearly all nocturnal), the bears, the gen- 
ets, most weasels, the marten tribe, the hedgehog, and a few 
others — were not always solitary creatures. For some of them 
we have positive evidence that they remained sociable so long as 
they escaped extermination by man, and we have reason to 
beHeve that nearly all of them were in the same conditions in 
times past.^ But even if there always existed a few unsociable 
species, the fact is that man has always considered them an 
exception. 

The lesson of nature was, thus, that even the strongest beasts 
are bound to combine. And that man who had witnessed once 
in his life an attack of wild dogs, or dholes, upon the biggest 
beasts of prey, certainly realized, once and forever, the irresis- 
tible force of the tribal unions, and the confidence and courage 
with which they inspire every individual. Man made divinities 
of these dogs, and worshipped them, trying by all sorts of magic 
to acquire their courage. 

In the prairies and the woods our earliest ancestors saw 
myriads of animals, all living in clans and tribes. Countless 
herds of red-deer, fallow deer, reindeer, gazelles and antelopes, 
thousands of droves of buffaloes and legions of wild horses, wild 
donkeys, quaggas, zebras, and so on, were moving over the 
boundless plains, peacefully grazing side by side. Even the 
dreary plateaus had their herds of llamas and wild camels. And 
when man approached these animals, he soon realized how 
closely connected all these beings were in their respective droves 
or herds. Even when they seemed fully absorbed in grazing, 
^See Mutual Aid, chaps. I. and II., and Appendix. 

VII [ i6 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

and apparently took no notice of the others, they closely watched 
each other's movements, always ready to join in some common 
action. Man saw that all the deer tribe, whether they graze or 
merely gambol, always keep sentries, which never release their 
watchfulness and never are late to signal the approach of a beast 
of prey; he knew how, in case of sudden attack, the males and 
the females would encircle their young ones and face the enemy, 
exposing their lives for the safety of the feeble ones; and how, 
even with such timid creatures as the antelopes, or the fallow 
deer, the old males would often sacrifice themselves in order to 
cover the retreat of the herd. Man knew all that, which we 
ignore or easily forget, and he repeated it in his tales, embcUish- 
ing the acts of courage and self-sacrifice with his primitive poetry, 
or mimicking them in his rehgious tribal dances. Still less could 
he ignore the great migrations of animals, because be followed 
them — just as the Chukchi follows still the herds of the wild 
reindeer, when the clouds of mosquitoes drive them from one 
place of the Chukchi peninsula to another, or as the Lapp fol- 
lows the herds of his half-domesticated reindeer in their wander- 
ings, over which he has no control. And if we, with all our book- 
learning, feel unable to understand how animals scattered over a 
wide territory can warn each other so as to bring their thousands 
to a given spot before they begin their march north, south, or 
west, our ancestors, who considered the animals as beings so 
much wiser than themselves, saw no difficulty in explaining that 
intercourse. For them all animals — beasts, birds, and fishes 
alike — were in continual communication, warning each other by 
means of hardly perceptible signs or sounds, informing one 
another about all sorts of events, and thus constituting one vast 
community, which had its own habits and rules of propriety and 
good behavior. Even to-day deep traces of that conception of 
nature survive in the folklore of all nations. 

From the populous, animated, and gay villages of the mar- 
mots, the prairie dogs, the jerboas, the hamsters, and so on, and 
from the colonies of that silent sage, the beaver, with which the 
Post-glacial rivers were thickly studded, primitive man, who him- 
self had begun as a nomad forest-dweller, could learn the ad- 
vantages of settled Hfe, permanent dwelhngs, and labor in com- 

VII [ 17 ] 



THE BIRTO OF CONSCIENCE 

mon. Even now we can see how the nomad cattle-breeders of 
Mongolia, whose improvidence is phenomenal, learn from the 
striped marmot {Tamias striatus) the advantages of agriculture 
and foresight when they plunder quite regularly every autumn 
the underground galleries of this rodent, and seize its provisions 
of eatable bulbs. The granaries of many smaller rodents, full of 
all sorts of eatable seeds, must have given man the first sugges- 
tion as to- the culture of cereals. In fact, the sacred books of the 
East contain many an allusion to the foresight and laboriousness 
of the animals, which are set up as an example to man. 

The birds, in their turn — almost every one of their species — 
gave our ancestors a lesson of the most intimate sociability, of the 
joys of social life, and its enormous advantages. It certainly did 
not escape the attention of man that, even among the birds of 
prey, many species of falcons are extremely sociable, and that 
even some eagles com.bine for hunting; while the flocks of kites 
will sometimes chase the strongest eagle and get hold of its spoil. 
And they saw, of course, many a time, how the smallest birds, if 
they are numerous enough, overcome their first terror at the sight 
of a hawk, and chase it, immensely enjoying this kind of sport. 

The nesting associations of aquatic birds, and their unanim- 
ity in defending their young broods and eggs, were well known 
to man. He knew that as soon as he approached the shore of a 
lake where thousands of birds belonging to different species were 
nesting, his appearance would be signalled at once; how, the 
moment he would set his foot upon their grounds, hundreds of 
birds would circle and fly round him, skim over his face, bewilder 
him by the flapping of their wings, deafen him by their cries, and 
often compel him to retreat. Man knew this only too well, for 
his very existence in the early summer depended upon his capac- 
ity to resist such a combined attack of the winged tribe. And 
then the joy of life in the autumn societies of the bird- youngsters 
was certainly familiar to people who themselves lived in the 
woods and by the side of the forest brooks. Who knows if the 
very idea of wide tribal unions, or, at least, of those great tribal 
hunts {aha with the Mongols, kada with the Tunguses), which 
are real jttes, lasting a couple of months every autumn, was not 
suggested by such autumn gatherings of the birds, in which so 
VII [i8] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

many widely different species join together, spending a few hours 
every day in providing their food, and then chattering and 
fluttering about the remainder of the time ? 

Man knew also, of course, the gay play of animals, the sports 
in which several species delight, the concerts and dances of some 
others; the flights which certain species perform in the evenings, 
sometimes with a wonderful art and elaboration; the noisy 
meetings which are held by the swallows and other migrating 
birds, for years in succession, on the same spot, before they start 
on their long journeys south. And how often man must have 
stood in bewilderment as he saw the immense migrating columns 
of birds passing over his head for many hours in succession. 
The ' brute savage ' knew and meditated on all these beauties of 
nature, Vvhich we have forgotten in our towns, and which we do 
not even lind in our 'natural history' books, compiled for teach- 
ing anything but Kfe; while the narratives of the great explorers 
— the Humboldts, the Audubons, the Azaras, the Brehms — of 
which every page was a picture of the real Hfe of nature, are 
mouldering in our libraries. 

In those times the wide world of the running waters and lakes 
was not a sealed book for man. He was familiar with its in- 
habitants as well. Even now many semi -savage natives of 
Africa and Polynesia profess a deep reverence for the crocodile. 
They consider him a near relative to man — a sort of ancestor. 
They even avoid naming him in their conversations, and if they 
must mention him they will say ' the old grandfather,' or use some 
other word expressing kinship and veneration. The crocodile, 
they maintain, acts exactly as they themselves do. He will never 
finally swallow his prey without having invited his relatives and 
friends to share the food; and if one of his tribe has been killed 
by man, otherwise than in due and just blood revenge, he will 
take vengeance upon any one of the murderer's kin. Therefore, 
if a negro has been eaten by a crocodile, his tribe will take the 
greatest care to discover the real culprit, and when he has been 
discovered and killed, they will carefully examine his intestines, 
in order to make sure that there has been no mistake; but if no 
proof of the beast's guilt is forthcoming, they will make all sorts 
of expiatory amends to the crocodile tribe, in order to appease 
VII [ 19 ] 



THE BIRra OF CONSCIENCE 

the relatives of the innocently slaughtered individual, and con- 
tinue to search for the real culprit. Otherwise the kinsfolk of 
the former would take revenge. The same behef exists among 
the Red Indians concerning the rattlesnake and the wolf, and its 
bearing upon the subsequent development of the idea of justice 
is self-evident. 

The fishes, their shoals, and the ways they play in the trans- 
parent waters, exploring them by their scouts before they move 
in a given direction, must have deeply impressed man from a 
remote antiquity. Traces of this impression are found in folk- 
lore in many parts of the globe. Thus, for instance, Dekana- 
wideh, the legendary law-giver of the Five Nations of the Red 
Indians, who is supposed to have given them the class organiza- 
tion, is represented as having retired first to meditate in contact 
with nature. He ' reached the side of a smooth, clear, running 
stream, transparent and full of fishes. He sat down, reclining on 
the sloping bank, gazing intent into the waters, watching the 
fishes playing about in complete harmony. . . .' Thereupon he 
conceived the scheme of dividing his people into gentes and 
classes, or totems.^ 

Altogether, for the primitive savage, animals are mysterious, 
problematic beings, possessed of a wide knowledge of the things 
of nature. They know much more than they are ready to tell us. 
In some way or another, by the aid of senses much more refined 
than ours, and by teUing to each other all that they notice in 
their rambles and flights, they know everything, for miles round. 
And if man has been 'just' toward them, they will warn him of 
a coming danger, as they warn each other; but they will take no 
heed of him if he has not been straightforward in his actions. 
Snakes and birds (the owl is a leader of the snakes), mammals 
and insects, Uzards and fishes — all understand each other, and 
continually communicate their observations to one another. 
They all belong to one brotherhood, into which they may, in 
some cases, admit man. 

Inside this vast brotherhood there are, of course, the still 

closer brotherhoods of beings 'of one blood.' The monkeys, 

^J. Brant-Sero, 'Dekanawideh,' in Man, 1901, p. 166. In other 
legends the wise man of the tride learns wisdom from the beaver, or the 
squirrel, or some bird. 

VII [ 20 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

the bears, the wolves, the elephants and the rhinoceroses, most 
ruminants, the hares and most of the rodents, the crocodiles, and 
so on, perfectly know their own kin, and they will not tolerate 
any one of their relatives to be slaughtered by man without 
taking, in one way or another, honest revenge. This conception 
must have had an extremely remote origin. It must have grown 
at a time when man had not yet become omnivorous (which I am 
incHned to think, must have happened during the Glacial period) 
and had not yet begun to hunt animals for food. However, the 
same conception has been retained down to the present time. 
Even now, when a savage is hunting, he is bound to respect cer- 
tain rules of propriety toward the animals, and he must perform 
certain expiatory ceremonies after his hunt. Most of these 
ceremonies are rigorously enacted, even nowadays in the savage 
clans, especially as regards those species which are considered 
the alHes of man. 

It is well known that two men belonging to two different 
clans or tribes can become brothers by mixing the blood of the 
two, obtained from small incisions made for that purpose. To 
enter into such a union was quite habitual in olden times, and we 
learn from the folklore of all nations, and especially the sagas, how 
religiously such a brotherhood was observed. But it was also 
quite habitual for man to enter into brotherhood with some 
animal. The tales continually mention it. An animal asks a 
hunter to spare it, and if the hunter accedes to the demand the 
two become brothers. And then the monkey, the bear, the doe, 
the bird, the crocodile, or the bee — any one of the sociable ani- 
mals — will take all possible care of the man-brother in the critical 
circumstances of his life, sending his or her animal brothers of 
different tribes to warn him or help him out of a difficulty. And 
if the warning comes too late, or is misunderstood, and he loses 
his life, they will all try to bring him back to hf e, and if they fail 
they will take the due revenge, just as if the man had been one of 
their own kin. 

When I journeyed in Siberia I was often struck, without 

understanding it, with the care which my Tungus or Mongol 

guide would take not to uselessly kill any animal. The fact is 

that every life is respected by a savage, or rather it was before he 

vn [ 21 ] 



THE BIRT^ OF CONSCIENCE 

came in contact with Europeans, If he kills an animal, it is for 
food or for clothing; but he does not destroy Hfe, as the whites 
do, for the mere excitement of the slaughter. True, the Red 
Indians nave done that with the buffaloes; but it was only after 
they had been for a long time in contact with the whites, and had 
got from them the rifle and the quick-firing revolver. Of course, 
there are rascals among the animals — the hyena, for instance, or 
the shrew-mouse, or the man-eating tiger; but these do not 
count: they are outlaws. As to the great animal world as a 
whole, savage children are taught to respect it and to see in it an 
extension of their own kin. 

The idea of 'justice,' conceived at its origin as revenge, is 
thus connected with observations made on animals. But it 
appears extremely probable that the idea of reward for ' just ' and 
'unjust' treatment must also have originated, with primitive 
mankind, from the idea that animals take revenge if they have 
not been properly treated by man, and repay kindness with kind- 
ness. This idea is so deeply rooted in the minds of the savages 
all over the world that it may be considered as one of the most 
primitive conceptions of mankind. Extended from a few ani- 
mals to all of them, it soon embodied the whole of nature — the 
trees and the forests, the rivers and the seas, the rocks and the 
mountains, which are all living. Gradually it grew to be a con- 
ception of the great whole, bound together by certain links of 
mutual support, which watches all the actions of the hving beings 
and, owing to that solidarity in the universe, undertakes the 
revenge of wrong deeds. It became the conception of the Eumen- 
ides and the Moirai of the Greeks, the Parcge of the Romans, 
and especially the Karma of the Hindoos. The Greek legend of 
the cranes of Ibikus, which Hnks together man and birds, and 
countless Eastern legends, are poetical embodiments of the same 
conception. 

This is what primitive man saw in nature and learned from it. 
With our scholastic education, which has systematically ignored 
nature and has tried to explain its most common facts by meta- 
physical subtleties, we began to forget that lesson. But for our 
Stone-Age ancestors sociability and mutual aid within the tribe ^ 
must have been a fact so general in nature, so habitual, and so 

Vn [ 22 ] 



THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 

common that they certainly could not imagine life under another 
aspect. The conception of an isolated being is a later product of 
civilization — an abstraction, which it took ages to develop in the 
human race. To a primitive man isolated life seems so strange, 
so much out of the usual course of nature, that when he sees a 
tiger, a badger, a shrew-mouse, or a kingfisher leading a solitary 
existence, or when he notices a tree that stands alone, far from 
the forest, he creates a legend to explain this strange occurrence. 
He makes no legends to explain Hf e in societies, but he has one 
for every case of sohtude. The hermit, if he is not a sage or a 
wizard, is in most cases an outcast of animal society. He has 
done something so contrary to the ordinary run of life that they 
have thrown him out. Very often he is a sorcerer, who has the 
command of all sorts of dangerous powers, and has something to 
do with the pestilential corpses which sow disease in the world. 
This is why he prowls at night, prosecuting his wicked designs 
under the cover of darkness. All other beings in nature are 
sociable, and human thought runs in this channel. Sociable 
life — that is, we, not I — is, in the eyes of primitive man, the 
normal form of life. // is life itself. Therefore ' We ' must have 
been the normal form of thinking for primitive man : a ' cate- 
gory ' of his understanding, as Kant might have said. And not 
even 'We,' which is still too personal, because it represents a 
multipHcation of the '/'s,' but rather such expressions as 'the 
men of the beaver tribe,' 'the kangaroo men,' or 'the turtles.' 
This was the primitive form of thinking, which nature impressed 
upon the mind of man. 

Here, in that identification, or, we might even say, in this ab- 
sorption of the ' I ' by the tribe, Hes the root of all ethical thought. 
The self -asserting ' individual' came much later on. Even now, 
with the lower savages, the 'individual' hardly exists at all. It 
is the tribe, with its hard-and-fast rules, superstitions, taboos, 
habits, and interests, which is always present in the mind of the 
child of nature. And in that constant, ever-present identifica- 
tion of the unit with the whole lies the substratum of all ethics, 
the germ out of which all the subsequent conceptions of justice, 
and the still higher conceptions of morality, grew up in the course 
of evolution. 

vn [23] 



VIII 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

THE GROWTH OF MODERN IDEAS ON ANIMALS" 

BY 

COUNTESS CESARESCO 



T F we accept, or even partly accept, the views oj Prince Kropot- 
kin as to the development 0} men from animals, and as to 
the nature and extent of our moral debt to the lower orders of life, 
then indeed the question of the possibility of a soul in the beast 
becomes of deepest interest. So also does the obverse of the same 
idea, our treatment of, our duty toward our ^^ brethren of the wild.^* 
How many of us have felt urged to lament with Burns: 

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion, 
Has broken nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion. 
Which makes thee startle 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion. 
An' fellow-mortal. " 

It is this side of the question, the humane side, that seems ever 
uppermost in the mind of the Countess E. Martinengo Cesaresco. 
She is known throughout the English and Italian races, indeed 
throughout the world, as a '^ friend of the creature.''^ She has been 
active in his service and has written in his favor many times. In 
the following article, however, she keeps in mind the historic and 
also the scientific side of her subject, and presents us a summation 
of the most recent (1907) thought upon the relation of man and 
beast. 

The last age of antiquity was an age of yeast. Ideas were in 
fermentation; religious questions came to be regarded as "in- 
teresting" — just as they are now. The spirit of inquiry took the 
VIII [ I ] 



THE SJ^L IN BEASTS 

place of placid acceptance on the one hand, and placid indiffer- 
ence on the other. It was natural that there should be a re- 
bound from the effort of Augustus to re-order religion on an Im- 
perial, conventional, and unemotional basis. Then, too, Rome, 
which had never been really Italian except in the sublime pre- 
visions of Virgil, grew every day more cosmopolitan: the deni- 
zens of the discovered world found their way thither on business, 
for pleasure, as slaves — the influence of these last not being the 
least important factor, though its extent and character are not 
easy to define. Everything tended to foment a religious unrest 
which took the form of one of those "returns to the East" that 
are ever destined to recur: the spiritual sense of the Western 
world became Orientalized. The worship of Isis and Serapis 
and much more of Mithra proved to be more exciting than the 
worship of the Greek and Roman gods which represented 
Nature and law, while the new cults proposed to raise the veil on 
what transcends natural perception. No doubt the atmosphere 
of the East itself favored their rapid development ; the traveller 
in North Africa must be struck by the extraordinary frequency 
with which the symbols of Mithraism recur in the sculpture and 
mosaics of that once great Roman dependency. Evidently the 
birthland of St. Augustine bred in the matter-of-fact Roman 
colonist the same nostalgia for the Unknowable which even now 
a lonely night under the stars of the Sahara awakes in the dullest 
European soul. Personal immortality as a paramount doctrine ; 
a further hfc more real than this one; ritual purification, re- 
demption by sacrifice, mystical union with deity — these were 
among the un- Roman and even anti-Roman conceptions which 
lay behind the new, strange propaganda, and prepared the way 
for the diffusion of Christianity. With the Italian peasants who 
clung to the unmixed older faith no progress was made till perse- 
cution could be called in as an auxiliary. 

In such a time it was a psychological certainty that among 
the other Eastern ideas which were coming to the fore would be 
those ideas about animals which are roughly classed under the 
head of Pythagoreanism. The apostles of Christ in their jour- 
neys east or west might have met a singular individual who 
was carrying on an apostolate of his own, the one clear and un- 

VIII [ 2 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

yielding point of which was the abolition of animal sacrifices. 
This was Apollonius of Tyana, our knowledge of whom is de- 
rived from the biography, in part perhaps fanciful, written by 
Philostratus in the third century to please the Empress Julia 
Domna, who was interested in occult matters. Apollonius 
worked wonders as well attested as those, for instance, of the 
Russian Father John, but he seems to have considered his power 
the naturally produced result of an austere life and abstinence 
from flesh and wine, which is a thoroughly Buddhist or Jaina 
theory. He was a Theosophist who refrained from attacking 
the outward forms and observances of established religion when 
they did not seem to him cither to be cruel or else incongruous to 
the degree of preventing a reverential spirit. He did not entirely 
understand that this degree is movable, any more than do those 
persons who want to substitute Gregorian chants for opera airs 
in rural Italian churches. He did not mind the Greek statues 
which appealed to the imagination by suggestions of beauty, but 
he blamed the Egyptians for representing deity as a dog or an 
ibis; if they disliked images of stone, why not have a temple 
where there were no images of any kind, where all was left to the 
inner vision of the worshipper ? In which cjucstion, almost acci- 
dentally, Apollonius throws out a hint of the highest form of 
spiritual worship. 

The keenly intellectual thinkers whom we call the Fathers of 
the Church saw that the majority of the ideas then agitating 
men's minds might find a quietus in Christian dogma, which 
suited them a great deal better than the vague and often gro- 
tesque shape they had worn hitherto. But there was a residuum 
of which they felt an instinctive fear, and pecuhar notions about 
animals had the ill-luck of being placed at the head of these. 
It could not have been a fortunate coincidence that two of the 
most prominent men who held them in the early centuries were 
declared foes of the new faith — Celsus and Porphyry. 

When the Church triumphed, the treatise written by Celsus 
would have been no doubt entirely destroyed hke other works of 
the same sort, had not Origen made a great number of quota- 
tions from it for the purpose of confutation. Celsus was no 
borne disputant after the fashion of the Octavius of Minucius, 
VXii [3] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

but a man of almost encyclopaedic learning; if he was a less fair 
critic than he held himself to be, it was less from want of infor- 
mation than from want of that sympathy which is needful for 
true comprehension. The inner feeling of such a man toward 
the Christian Sectaries was not nearly so much that of a Torque- 
mada in regard to heretics as that of an old-fashioned Tory up- 
holder of throne and altar toward dissent fifty years ago. It 
was a feeling of social aloofness. 

Yet Celsus wished to be fair, and he had studied rehgions to 
enough purpose not to condemn as delusion or untruth every- 
thing that a superficial adversary would have rejected at once; 
for instance, he was ready to allow that the appearances of Christ 
to His disciples after the Crucifixion might be explained as 
psychical phenomena. Possibly he believed that truth, not 
falsehood, was the ultimate basis of all religions, as was the 
belief of Apollonius before him. In some respects Celsus was 
more unprejudiced than Apollonius; this can be observed in his 
remarks on Egyptian zoomorphism; it causes surprise, he says, 
when you go inside one of the splendid Egyptian temples to find 
for divinity a cat, a monkey, or a crocodile, but to the initiated they 
are symbols which under an allegorical veil turn people to honor 
imperishable ideas, not perishable animals as the vulgar suppose. 

It may have been his recondite researches which led Celsus 
to take up the question of the intelligence of animals and the 
conclusions to be drawn from it. He only touches lightly on 
the subject of their origin; he seems to lean toward the theory 
that the soul, life, mind, only is made by God, the corruptible 
and passing body being a natural growth or perhaps the handi- 
work of inferior spirits. He denied that reason belonged to 
man alone, and still more strongly that God created the universe 
for man rather than for the other animals. Only absurd pride, 
he says, can engender such a thought. He knew very well 
that this, far from being a new idea, was the normal view of 
the ancient world from Aristotle to Cicero; the distinguished 
men who disagreed with it had never won more than a small 
minority over to their opinion. Celsus takes Euripides to task 
for saying : 

• The sun and moon are made to serve mankind." 

VIII [ 4 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

Why mankind ? he asks ; why not ants and flies ? Night serves 
them also for rest, and day for seeing and working. If it be 
said that we are the king of animals because we hunt and catch 
them or because we eat them, why not say that we are made 
for them because they hunt and catch us? Indeed, they are 
better provided than we, for while we need arms and nets to 
take them and the help of several men and dogs, Nature fur- 
nishes them with the arms they require, and we are, as it were, 
made dependent on them. You want to make out that God 
gave you the power to take and kill wild animals, but at the 
time when there were no towns or civilization or society or arms 
or nets, animals probably caught and devoured men while men 
never caught animals. In this way, it looks more as if God 
subjected man to animals than vice versa. If men seem dif- 
ferent from animals because they build cities, make laws, obey 
magistrates and rulers, you ought to note that this amounts to 
nothing at all, since ants and bees do just the same. Bees 
have their "kings"; some command, others obey; they make 
war, win battles, take prisoners the vanquished ; they have their 
towns and quarters; their work is regulated by fixed periods; 
they punish the lazy and cowardly — at least, they expel the 
drones. As to ants, they practise the science of social economy 
just as well as we do; they have granaries which they fill with 
provisions for the winter; they help their comrades if they see 
them bending under the weight of a burden; they carry their 
dead to places which become family tombs; they address each 
other when they meet: whence it follows that they never lose 
their way. We must conclude, therefore, that they have com- 
plete reasoning powers and common notions of certain general 
truths, and that they have a language and know how to ex- 
press fortuitous events. If some one, then, looked down from 
the height of heaven on to the earth, what difference would he 
see between our actions and those of ants and bees? If man 
is proud of knowing magical secrets, serpents and eagles know 
a great deal more, for they use many preservatives against 
poisons and diseases, and are acquainted with the virtues of 
certain stones with which they cure the ailments of their young 
ones, while if men find out such a cure they think they have hit 
vni [5I 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

on the greatest wonder in tne world. Finally, if man imagine 
that he is superior to animals because he possesses the notion 
of God, let him know that it is the same with many of them; 
what is there more divine, in fact, than to foresee and to fore- 
tell the future? Now for that purpose men have recourse to 
animals, especially to birds, and all our soothsayers do is to 
understand the indications given by these. If, therefore, birds 
and other prophetic animals show us by signs the future as it 
is revealed to them by God, it proves that they have closer 
relations with the deity than we; that they are wiser and more 
loved by God. Very enlightened men have thought that they 
understood the language of certain animals, and in proof of 
this they have been known to predict that birds would do some- 
thing or go somewhere, and this was observed to come true. 
No one keeps an oath more religiously or is more faithful to 
God than the elephant, which shows that he knows Him. 

Hence, concludes Celsus, the universe has not been made 
for man any more than for the eagle or the dolphin. Every- 
thing was created not in the interest of something else, but to 
contribute to the harmony of the whole in order that the world 
might be absolutely perfect. God takes care of the universe; 
it is that which His providence never forsakes, that which never 
falls into disorder. God no more gets angry with men than 
with rats or monkeys : everything keeps its appointed place. 

In this passage Celsus rises to a higher level than in any 
other of the excerpts preserved for us by Origen. The tone 
of irony which usually characterizes him disappears in this 
dignified affirmation of supreme wisdom justified of itself, not 
by the little standards of men — or ants. It must be recognized 
as a lofty conception, commanding the respect of those who 
differ from it, and reconcihng all apparent difficulties and con- 
tradictions forced upon us by the contemplation of man and 
Nature. But it brings no water from the cool spring to souls 
dying of thirst; it expounds in the clearest way and even in 
the noblest way the very thought which drove men into the 
Christian fold far more surciy than the learned apologies of 
controversialists like Origen: the thought of the crusliing un- 
importance of the individual. 

vm [ 6 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

The least attentive reader must be struck by the real knowl- 
edge of natural history shown by Celsus; his ants are nearly 
as conscientiously observed as Lord Avebury's. Yet a certain 
suspicion of conscious exaggeration detracts from the serious- 
ness of his arguments ; he strikes one as more sincere in disbeliev- 
ing than in believing. A modern writer has remarked that 
Celsus in the second half of the second century forestalled 
Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth by denying human 
ascendancy and contending that man may be a little lower 
than the brute. But it scarcely seems certain whether he was 
convinced by his own reasoning or was not rather replying by 
paradoxes to what he considered the still greater paradoxes of 
Christian theology. 

The shadow of no such doubt falls on the pages of the neo- 
platonists Plotinus and Porphyry. To them the destiny of 
animals was not an academic problem, but an obsession. The 
questions which Heine's young man asked of the waves — "What 
signifies man? Whence does he come? Whither does he 
go?" — were asked by them with passionate earnestness in 
their application to all sentient things. Plotinus reasoned, 
with great force, that intelligent beast-souls must be like the 
soul of man, since in itself the essence of the soul could not be 
different. Porphyry (born at Tyre, a.d. 233), accepting this 
postulate that animals possess an intelligent soul like ours, 
went on to declare that it was therefore unlawful to kill or feed 
on them under any circumstances. If justice is due to rational 
beings, how is it possible to evade the conclusion that we are 
also bound to act justly toward the races below us? He who 
loves all animated nature will not single out one tribe of inno- 
cent beings for hatred; if he loves the whole he will love every 
part, and, above all, that part which is most closely alHed to 
ourselves. Porphyry was quite ready to admit that animals 
in their own way made use of words, and he mentions Melampus 
and Apollonius as among the philosophers who understood 
their language. 

Neoplatonism penetrated into the early church, but divested 
of its views on animal destiny; even the Catholic neoplatonist 
Boethius, though he was sensitively fond of animals (witness 

viii It] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

his lines about caged birds), yet took the extreme view of the 
hard and fast Hne of separation, as may be seen by his poem 
on the "downward head," which he interpreted to indicate 
the earth-bound nature of all flesh save man. Birds, by the 
by, and even fishes, not to speak of camelopards, can hardly 
be said to have a "downward head." Meanwhile, the other 
manner of feehng, if not of thinking, reasserted its power, as 
it always will, for it belongs to the primal things. Excluded 
from the broad road, it came in by the narrow way — the way 
that leads to heaven. In the wake of the Christian Guru came 
a whole troop of charming beasts, little less saintly and miracu- 
lous than their holy protectors, and thus preachers, of the re- 
ligion of love were spared the reproach of showing an all-un- 
lo\'ing face toward creatures that could return love for love 
as well as most and better than many of the human kind. The 
saint saved the situation, and the Church wisely let him alone 
to discourse to his brother fishes or his sister turtle-doves, 
without inquiring about the strict orthodoxy of the proceeding.* 

Unhappily the more direct inheritors of neoplatonist dreams 
were not let alone. A trend of tendency toward Pythagorean- 
ism runs through their different developments from Philo to 
the Gnostics, from the Gnostics, through the Paulicians, to the 
Albigenses. It passes out of our sight when these were sup- 
pressed in the thirteenth century by the most sanguinary perse- 
cution that the world has seen; but before long it was to re- 
appear in one shape or another, and we may be sure that the 
thread was never wholly lost. 

At an early date, in the heart of official Catholicism, an 
inconsistency appeared which is less easily explained than 
homihes composed for fishes or hymns for birds; namely, the 
strange business of animal prosecutions. Without inquiring 
exactly what an animal is, it is easy to bestow upon it either 
blessings or curses. The beautiful rite of the blessing of the 
beasts, which is still performed once a year in many places, 

^ It is the common impression in Rome that the present occupant of 
the Chair of St. Peter is nearer to the Saints than to the doctors; it does 
not cause surprise, therefore, though it must cause a great deal of 
pleasvire, to find him recently bestowing his blessing "on all protectors 
of animals throughout the world. " — C. 

VIII [ 8 1 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

involves no doctrinal crux. In Corsica the priest goes up to 
the high mountain plateaux where the animals pasture in the 
summer, and after saying mass in presence of all the four- 
footed family, he solemnly blesses them and exhorts them to 
prosper and multiply. It is a dehglitful scene, but it does not 
affect the coiiception of the moral status of animals, nor would 
that conception be affected by a right-down malediction or 
order to quit. What, however, can be thought of a regular 
trial of inconvenient or offending animals, in which great care 
is taken to keep up the appearance of fair-play to the defendants ? 
Our first impression is that it must be an elaborate comedy; 
but a study of the facts makes it impossible to accept this theory. 
The earliest allusions to such trials that seem to exist belong 
to the ninth century, which does not prove that they were the 
first of the kind. One trial took place in 824 a.d. The Coun- 
cil of Worms decided in 868 that if a man has been killed by 
bees they ought to suffer death, "but," added the judgment, 
"it will be permissible to eat their honey." A relic of the 
same order of ideas lingers in the habit some people have of 
shooting a horse which has caused a fatal accident, often the 
direct consequence of bad riding or bad driving. The earlier 
beast trials of which we have knowledge were conducted by 
laymen, the later by ecclesiastics, which suggests their origin 
in a folk-practice. A good, characteristic instance began on 
September 5th, 1370. The young son of a Burgundian swine- 
herd had been killed by three sows which seemed to have feared 
an attack on one of their young ones. All members of the 
herd were arrested as accomplices, which was a serious matter 
to their owners, the inmates of a neighboring convent, as the 
animals, if convicted, would be burnt and their ashes buried. 
The prior pointed out that three sows alone were guilty; surely 
the rest of the pigs ought to be acquitted. Justice did not 
move quickly in those times; it was on the 12th September, 
1379, that the Duke of Burgundy delivered judgment; only 
the three guilty sows and one young pig (what had it done?) 
were to be executed; the others were set at liberty, "notwith- 
standing that they had seen the death of the boy without de- 
fending him." Were the original ones all alive after nine 

VIII [ 9 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

years ? If so, would so long a respite have been granted them 
had no legal proceedings been instituted ? 

An important trial took place in Savoy in the year 1587. 
The accused was a certain fly. Two suitable advocates were 
assigned to the insects, who argued on their behalf that these 
creatures were created before man, and had been blessed by 
God who gave them the right to feed on grass, and for all these 
and other good reasons the flies were in their right when they 
occupied the vineyards of the Commune; they simply availed 
themselves of a legitimate privilege conforming to divine and 
natural law. The plaintiffs' advocate retorted that the Bible 
and common sense showed animals to be created for the utility 
of man; hence they could not have the right to cause him loss, 
to which the counsel for the insects replied that man had the 
right to command animals, no doubt, but not to persecute, 
excommunicate, and interdict them when they were merely con- 
forming to natural law, "which is eternal and immutable like 
the divine." 

The judges were so deeply impressed by this pleading that, 
to cut the case short, which seemed to be going against him 
the Mayor of St. Julien hastened to propose a compromise; 
he offered a piece of land where the flies might find a safe re- 
ireat and live out their days in peace and plenty. The offer 
was accepted. On June 29th, 1587, the citizens of St. Juhen 
were bidden to the market square by ringing the church bells, 
and after a short discussion they ratified the agreement, which 
handed over a large piece of land to the exclusive use of the 
insects. Hope was expressed that they would be entirely satis- 
fied with the bargain. A right of way across the land was, 
indeed, reserved to the public, but no harm whatever was to 
be done to the flies on their own territory. It was stated in 
the formal contract that the reservation was ceded to the insects 
in perpetuity. 

All was going well, when it transpired that, in the mean 
time, the flies' advocates had paid a visit to that much-vaunted 
piece of land, and when they returned they raised the strongest 
objection to it on the score that it was arid, sterile, and pro- 
duced nothing. The mayor's counsel disputed this; the land, 

VIII [ 10 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

he said, produced no end of nice small trees and bushes, the 
very things for the nutrition of insects. The judges intervened 
by ordering a survey to find out the real truth, which survey 
cost three florins. There, alas, the story ends, for the wind- 
ing up of the affair is not to be found in the archives of St. 
Julien. 

Records of 144 such trials have come to light. Of the two 
I have described, it will be remarked that one belongs, as it 
were, to criminal and the other to civil law. The last class is 
the most curious. No doubt the trial of flies or locusts was 
resorted to when other means of getting rid of them had failed; 
it was hoped, somehow, that the elaborate appearance of fair 
play would bring about a result not to be obtained by violence. 
We can hardly resist the inference that they involved some sort 
of recognition or intuition of animals' rights and even of ani- 
mal intelligence. 

Afterward, during the cruel witch mania, not a few cleverly 
trained animals were put to death on suspicion of diabolical 
possession, hke Bankes' horse, "Morocco," whose pretty tricks 
were mentioned by Shakespeare. It is lucky for the Prussian 
"Hans " that he lives in a more enlightened age. 

In the dawn of modern literature animals played a large, 
though artificial, part, which must not be quite ignored on ac- 
count of its artificiality, because in the Bestiaries, as in the 
-^sopic and Oriental fables from which they were mainly de- 
rived, there was an inextricable tangle of observations of the 
real creature and arbitrary ascription to him of human quali- 
ties and adventures. At last they became a mere method for 
attacking political or ecclesiastical abuses, but their great popu- 
larity was as much due to their outer as to their inner sense. 
There is not any doubt that at the same time floods of Eastern 
fairy-tales were migrating to Europe, and in these the most 
highly appreciated hero was always the friendly beast. In a 
romance of the thirteenth century called Guillaume de Palerme, 
all previous marvels of this kind were outdone by the story 
of a SiciUan prince who was befriended by a were-wolf ! 

It is not generally remembered that the Indian or Buddhist 
view of animals must have been pretty well known in Europe 
VIII [11] 



THE SO^ IN BEASTS 

at least as early as the fourteenth century. The account of 
the monastery "where many strange beasts of divers kinds do 
live upon a hill," which Fra Odoric, of Pordenone, dictated in 
1330, is a description, both accurate and charming, of a Bud- 
dhist animal refuge, and in the version given of it in Mande- 
ville's "Travels," if not in the original, it must have been read 
by nearly every one who could read, for no book ever had so 
vast a diffusion as the "Travels" of the elusive Knight of St. 
Albans. 

With the Italian renaissance came the full modern cEsthetic 
enjoyment of animals — the admiration of their beauty and 
perfection, which had been appreciated, of course, long before, 
but not quite in the same spirit. The all-round gifted Leo 
Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century took the same criti- 
cal delight in the points of a fine animal that a modern expert 
would take. He was a splendid rider, but his interest was not 
confined to horses; his love for his dog is shown by his having 
pronounced a funeral oration over him. 

We feel that with such men humanity toward animals was 
a part of good manners. "We owe justice to men," said the 
intensely civilized Montaigne, "and grace and benignity to 
other creatures that are capable of it; there is a natural com- 
merce and mutual obligation between them and us." Sir 
Arthur Helps, speaking of this, called it "using courtesy to 
animals," and, when one comes to think of it, is not such "cour- 
tesy" the particular mark and sign of a man of good breeding 
in all ages ? 

The Renaissance brought with it something deeper than a 
wonderful quickening of the a?sthetic sense in all directions; 
it also brought that spiritual quickening which is the co-effi- 
cient of every really upward movement of the human mind. 
It was to be foreseen that animals would have their portion of 
attention in the ponderings of the god-intoxicated musers on 
life and things w'ho have been called the sceptics of the Re- 
naissance. For the proof that they did receive it we have only 
to turn to the pages of Giordano Bruno: "Every part of crea- 
tion has its share in being and cognition." "There is a differ- 
ence, not in quality, but in quantity, between the soul of man, 
VUI [12] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

the animal, and the plant." "Among horses, elephants, and 
dogs there are single individuals which appear to have almost 
the understanding of men." "With what understanding the 
ant gnaws her grain of wheat lest it should sprout in her under- 
ground habitations ! " 

Bruno's prophetic guess, that instinct is inherited habit, 
might have saved Descartes (who was much indebted to the 
Nolan) from giving his name an unenviable immortality in 
connection with the theory which is nearly all that the ignorant 
know now of Cartesian philosophy. This was the theory that 
animals are automata, a sophism that may be said to have 
swept Europe, though it was not long before it provoked a re- 
action. Descartes got this idea from the very place where is 
was hkely to originate, from Spain. A certain Gomez Pereira 
advanced it before Descartes made it his own, which even led 
to-a charge of plagiarism. "Because a clock marks time and 
a bee makes honey, we are to consider the clock and the bee 
to -be machines. Because they do one thing better than man 
and no other thing so well as man, we are to conclude that 
they have no mind, but that Nature acts within them, holding 
their organs at her disposal." "Nor are we to think, as the 
ancients do, that animals speak, though we do not know their 
language, for, if that were so, they, having several organs re- 
lated to ours, might as easily communicate with us as with 
each other." 

About this, Huxley showed that an almost imperceptible 
imperfection of the vocal chord may prevent articulated sounds. 
Moreover, the click of the bushman, which is almost his only 
language, is exceedingly hke the sounds made by monkeys. 

Language, as defined by an eminent Itahan man of science, 
Professor Broca, is the faculty of making things known or ex- 
pressing them by signs or sounds. Much the same definition 
was given by Mivart, and if there be a better one, we have still 
to wait for it. Human language is evolved; at one time man 
had it not. The babe in the cradle is without it; the deaf 
mute, in his untaught state, is without it; er^o, the babe and 
the deaf mute cannot feel. Poor babes and poor deaf mutes, 
should the scientific Loyolas of the future adopt this view! 
VIII ' [ 13 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

I do not know if any one has remarked that rural and primi- 
tive folk can never bring themselves to believe of any foreign 
tongue that it is real human language like their own. To 
them it seems a jargon of meaningless and uncouth sounds. 

Chanct, a follower of Descartes, said that he would beheve 
that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries 
of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that 
they thought! Man himself does not think in words in mo- 
ments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. He cries 
out or he acts. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is 
action. The mother thinks in the kiss she gives her child. 
Perhaps God thinks in constellations. I asked a man who 
had saved many Hves by jumping into the sea, "What did you 
think of at the moment of doing it?" He repUed, "You do 
not think, or you might not do it." 

The whole trend of philosophic speculation worthy of the 
name lies toward unity, but the Cartesian theory would arbi- 
trarily divide even man's physical and sensational nature from 
that of the other animals. To remedy this, Descartes admitted 
that man was just as much an automatic machine as other creat- 
ures. By what right then does he complain when he happens 
to have a toothache? Because, says Descartes triumphantly, 
man has an immortal soul! The child thinks in his mother's 
womb, but the dog, which after scenting two roads takes the 
third without demur, sure that his master must have gone that 
way, this dog is acting "by springs," and neither thinks nor 
feels at all. 

The misuse of the ill-treated word "Nature" cannot hide 
the fact that the beginning, middle, and end of Descartes' argu- 
ment rests on a perpetually recurrent miracle. Descartes con- 
fessed as much when he said that God could make animals as 
machines, so why should it be impossible that he had made them 
as machines? Voltaire's clear reason revolted at this logic; 
he declared it to be absurd to imagine that God had given 
animals organs of feeling in order that they might not feel. He 
would have endorsed Professor Romanes' saying that "the 
theory of animal automatism which is usually attributed to 
Descartes can never be accepted by common sense." 
vni [14] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

On the other hand, while Descartes was being persecuted 
by the Church for opinions which he did not hold, this par- 
ticular opinion of his was seized upon by Catholic divines as 
a vindication of creation. Pascal so regarded it. The miracu- 
lous element in it did not disturb him. Malebranche said 
that though opposed by reason it was approved by faith. 

Descartes said that the idea that animals think and feel is 
a relic of childhood. The idea that they do 7iot think and feel 
might be more truly called a relic of that darkest side of per- 
verse childhood, the existence of which we are all fain to forget. 
Whoever has seen a little child throwing stones at a toad on 
the highway — and sad because his hands are too small to take 
up the bigger stones to throw — will understand what I mean. 
I do not wish to allude more than slightly to a point which is 
of too much importance to pass over in silence. Descartes 
was a vivisector; so were the pious people at Port Royal, who 
embraced his teaching with enthusiasm and liked to hear the 
howls of the dogs they vivisected. M. Emile Ferriere in his 
work "L'ame est la fonction du cerveau," sees in the "soul" 
of beasts exactly the same nature as in the "soul" of man; the 
difference, he maintains, is one of degree; thought generally 
inferior, it is sometimes superior to "souls" of certain human 
groups. Here is a candid materialist who deserves respect. 
But there is a school of physiologists nowadays which carries 
on an unflagging campaign in favor of belief in unconscious 
animal machines which work by springs, while denying that 
there is a God to wind up the springs, and in conscious human 
machines, while denying that there is a soul, independent of 
matter, which might account for the difference. "The wish is 
father to the thought." Non ragionam di lor ma guar da e passa. 

The strongest of all reasons for dismissing the machine 
theory of animals is their variety of idiosyncrasy. It is said 
that to the shepherd no two sheep look alike; it is certain that 
no two animals of any kind have the same characters. Some 
are selfish, some are unselfish, some are gentle, some irretriev- 
ably ill-tempered both to each other and to man. Some ani- 
mals do not show much regret at the loss of their offspring; 
with others it is manifestly the reverse. Edouard Quinet de- 

vni [15] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 



sm 



scribed how on one occasion, when visiting the hons' cage in 
the Jardin des Plantcs, he observed the Hon gently place his 
large paw on the forehead of the Uoness, and so they remained, 
grave and still, all the time he was there. He asked Geoffroy 
Saint-Hilaire, who was with him, what it meant. "Their Hon 
cub," was the answer, "died this morning." "Pity, benevo- 
lence, sympathy, could be read on those rugged faces." That 
these quaHties are often absent in sentient beings, what man 
can doubt ? but they are not to be found in the best machine- 
made animals in all Nuremberg! 

One of the first upholders of the idea of legislative protec- 
tion of animals was Jeremy Bentham, who asked why the law 
should refuse its protection to any sensitive being? iMost 
people forget the degree of opposition which was encountered 
by the earHcr combatants of cruel practices and pastimes in 
England. Cobbctt made a furious attack on a clergyman 
who, to his honor, was agitating for the suppression of bull- 
baiting, "the poor man's sport," as Cobbett called it. That 
it demoralized the poor man as well as tormented the bull 
never entered into the head of the inimitable wieldcr of English 
prose, pure and undcfilcd, who took it under his (happily) in- 
effectual protection. Societies for the prevention of cruelty 
to animals had, in their day, to undergo almost as much criti- 
cism and ridicule in England as they now meet with in some 
parts of the Continent. Even the establishment of the Dogs' 
Home in London raised a storm of disapproval, as may be seen 
by any one who turns over the files of the Times for October, 
i860. If the friends of humanity persevere, the change of 
sentiment which has become an accompHshcd fact in England, 
will in the end triumph elsewhere. 

Unfortunately, humane sentiment, and espcciaUy humane 
practice, do not progress on a level line. As long ago as 1782 
an English writer named Soame Jenyns protested against the 
wickedness of shooting a bear on an inaccessible island of ice, 
or an eagle on the mountain's top. "We are unable to give 
Hfe and therefore ought not to take it away from the meanest 
insect without sufi'icient reason." What would he say if he 
came back to earth to find whole species of beautiful winged 

VIII [ 16 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

creatures being destroyed to afford a more or less barbarous 
ornament for women's heads ? 

The "discovery" of Indian literature brought prominently 
forward in the West the Indian ideas of animals of which the 
old travellers had given the earliest news. The effect of famil- 
iarity with those ideas may be traced in many writers, but no- 
where to such an extent as in the works of Schopenhauer, for 
whom, as for many more obscure students, they formed the 
most attractive and interesting part of Oriental lore. Schopen- 
hauer cannot speak about animals without using a tone of 
passionate vehemence which was, without doubt, genuine. He 
felt the intense enjoyment in observing them which the lonely 
soul has ever felt, whether it belonged to saint or sinner. All 
his pessimism disappears when he leaves the haunts of man 
for the retreats of beasts. What a pleasure it is, he says, to 
watch a wild animal going about undisturbed! It shows us 
our own nature in a simpler and more sincere form. "There 
is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. 
Every other is true and sincere." It strikes me that total sin- 
cerity did not shine on the face of a dog which I once saw trot- 
ting innocently away, after burying a rabbit he had caught in 
a ploughed field, near a tree in the hedge — the only tree there 
was — which would make it easy for him to identify the spot. 
But about that I will say no more. The German "Friend of 
the Creature" was indignant at "the unpardonable forget- 
fulness in which the lower animals have hitherto been left by 
the morahsts of Europe." The duty of protecting them, neg- 
lected by religion, falls to the police. Mankind are the devils 
of the earth, and animals the souls they torment. 

Full of these sentiments, Schopenhauer was prepared to wel- 
come unconditionally the Indian conception of the Wheel of 
Being and to close his eyes to its defects. Strauss, too, hailed 
it as a doctrine which "unites the whole of Nature in one sacred 
and mysterious bond" — a bond in which, he goes on to say, 
a breach has been made by the Judaism and DuaHsm of Chris- 
tianity. He might have observed that the Church derived her 
notions on the subject rather from Aristotle than from Semitic 
sources. 

VIII [ 17 ] 



THE SqpL IN BEASTS 

Schopenhauer came to the conclusion that the ill-treatment 
of animals arose directly from the denial to them of immortality, 
while it was ascribed to men. There is and there is not truth 
in this. When all is said, the humane man always was and 
always will be human; "the merciful man regardeth the life 
of his beast." And since people reason to fit their acts rather 
than act to fit their reasoning, he will even find a motive for 
his humanity where others find an excuse for the lack of it. 
Humphry Primatt wrote in 1776: "Cruelty to a brute is an in- 
jury irreparable because there is no future life to be a com- 
pensation for present afflictions." 

Mr. Lecky, in his "History of European Morals," tells of 
a cardinal who let himself be bitten by gnats because "we have 
heaven, but these poor creatures only present enjoyment!" 
Could Jaina do more ? 

Strauss thought that the rising tide of popular sentiment 
about animals was the direct result of the abandonment by 
science of the spiritualistic isolation of man from Nature. I 
suspect that those who have worked hardest for animals in the 
last half century cared little about the origin of species, while 
it is certain that some professed evolutionists have been their 
worst foes. The fact remains, however, that by every rule of 
logic the theory of evolution ought to produce the effect which 
Strauss thought that it had produced. The discovery which 
gives its name to the nineteenth century revolutionizes the 
whole philosophic conception of the place of animals in the 
Universe. 

Lamarck, whom Cuvier so cruelly attacked, was the first 
to discern the principle of evolution. At one time he held the 
Chair of Zoology at the University of Paris; but the opposition 
which his ideas met with crushed him in body, though not in 
soul, and he died bhnd and in want in 1829, only consoled by 
the care of an admirable daughter. His last words are said 
to have been that it is easier to discover a truth than to convince 
others of it. 

An Italian named Carlo Lessona was one of tlie first to be 
convinced. He wrote a work containing the phrase, "the in- 
telhgence of animals" — which work, by the rule then in force, 

VIII [ 18 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

had to be presented to the ecclesiastical Censor at Turin to 
receive his permit before publication. Tlie canon who ex- 
amined the book fell upon the words above mentioned, and re- 
marked, "This expression, 'intelligence of animals,' will never 
do!" "But," said Lessona, "it is commonly used in natural 
history books." "Oh!" replied the canon, "natural history 
has much need of revision." 

The great and cautious Darwin said that the senses, intui- 
tions, emotions, and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, 
curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man boasts, may be 
found in an incipient or even sometimes in a well-developed 
condition, in the lower animals. "Man, with all his noble 
qualities, his God-like intellect, still bears in his bodily frame ■ 
the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Our brethren fly in 
the air, haunt the bushes, and swim in the sea." Darwin 
agreed with Agassiz in recognizing in the dog something very 
like the human conscience. 

Dr. Arnold said that the whole subject of the brute creation 
was such a painful mystery that he dared not approach it. 
Michelet called animal life a "sombre mystery," and shuddered 
at the "daily murder," hoping that in another globe "these 
base and cruel fatalities may be spared to us." It is strange 
to find how many men of very different types have wandered 
without a guide in these dark alleys of speculation. A few of 
them arrived at, or thought they had arrived at, a solution. 
Lord Chesterfield wrote that "animals preying on each other 
is a law of Nature which we did not make and which we cannot 
undo, for 'if I do not eat chickens my cat will eat mice.' " But 
the appeal to Nature will not satisfy every one; our whole 
human conscience is a protest against Nature, while our moral 
actions are an attempt to effect a compromise. Paley pointed 
out that the law was not good, since we could live without ani- 
mal food, and wild beasts could not. He offered another justi- 
fication, the permission of Scripture. This was satisfactory to 
him, but he must have been aware that it waives the question 
without answering it. 

Some humane people nave taken refuge in the automata 
argument, which is like taking a sleeping-draught to cure a 

VIII [ 19 ] 



THE SOUL IN BEASTS 

broken leg. Others, again, look for justice to animals in the 

one and only hope that man possesses of justice to himself — in 

compensation after death for unmerited suffering in this life. 

Leibnitz said that Eternal Justice ought to compensate animals 

for their misfortunes on earth. It is curious to find that in the 

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seven or eight small works, 

written in Latin in support of this thesis, were published in 

Germany and Sweden. Probably in all the world a number, 

unsuspectedly large, of sensitive minds has endorsed the belief 

expressed so well in the lines which Southey wrote on coming 

home to find that a favorite old dog had been "destroyed" 

during his absence : 

Mine is no narrow creed; 

And He who gave thee being did not frame 

The mystery of Hfe to be the sport 

Of merciless man ! There is another world 

For all that live and move — a better one ! 

Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine 

Infinite Goodness to the little bounds 

Of their own charity, may envy thee! 

The holders of this "no narrow creed" start with all the 
advantages from the mere point of view of dialectics. They 
can boast that they have placed the immortality of the soul on 
a scientific basis. For truly, it is more reasonable to suppose 
that the soul is natural than supernatural, a word invented 
to clothe our ignorance ; and, if natural, why not universal ? 

They have the right to say, moreover, that they and they 
alone have "justified the ways of God." They alone have 
admitted all creation that groaneth and travailcth to the ulti- 
mate guerdon of the "Love that moves the sun and other 
stars." 



VIII [ 20 ] 



IX 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

"HUMAN SELECTION AND MARRIAGE" 

BY 

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 



J LFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., 

stands to-day as the father of modern science, the dean of 
living scholars. An aged man 0} eighty- jour, he is still vigorous 
and full of thought, still writing for a world which is little likely 
ever to forget his remarkable entry into fame. It was he who. at the 
same time as Darwin, worked out the theory of the survival of the 
fittest. From his far-ojj exploring station in the Malayan archi- 
pelago, Mr. Wallace sent home to Darwin an essay which covered 
the very ground upon which its recipient was at work. Darwin 
made public both his own work and Wallace^ s, and thus the two 
men shone forth as twin stars of the great new doctrine. It was 
around Darwin that the attack and defence of evolution centred, 
and doubtless he proved himself the greater scientist of the two; so 
that the fame of the dead discoverer has justly outshone the fame of 
the one still living. Yet science knows few names to equal that of 
Wallace. • 

His article here treats the startling question of the failure of his 
famous doctrine to apply to modern conditions of society, and, in 
consequence, the possible retrogression of human life and the sur- 
vival of the unfit. The danger is a real one; it has drawn wide 
attention of late. Modern pity and charity protect the feeble; 
modern war and competition destroy the strong. Mr. Wallace 
finds the remedy in the wisdom of women, in the marriage customs 
of the future. Whether he is right in this or no, he makes star- 
K [I] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

tlingly evident the jact that me oldbrute law oj survival has ceased 
to operate upon mankind. 

In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed 
himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground 
that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and 
the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for 
wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is 
notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each 
generation from the lower than from the middle and upper 
classes. As a recent American writer well puts it, "We behold 
the melancholy spectacle of the renewal of the great mass of 
society from the lowest classes, the highest classes to a great ex- 
tent either not marrying or not having children. The floating 
population is always the scum, and yet the stream of life is largely 
renewed from this source. Such a state of affairs, sufficiently 
dangerous in any society, is simply suicidal in the democratic 
civilization of our day." ^ 

That the check to progress here indicated is a real one few 
will deny, and the problem is evidently felt to be one of vital im- 
portance, since it has attracted the attention of some of our most 
thoughtful writers, and has quite recently furnished the theme 
for a perfect flood of articles in our best periodicals. I propose 
here to consider very briefly the various suggestions made by 
these writers, and afterward shall endeavor to show that, when 
the course of social evolution shall have led to a more rational 
organization of society, the problem will receive its final solution 
by the action of physiological and social agencies, and in perfect 
harmony v/ith the highest interests of humanity. 

ARE THE RESULTS OF TRAINING HEREDITARY? 

Before discussing the question itself it will be well to consider 
whether there are in fact any other agencies than some form of 
selection to be relied on. It has been generally accepted hitherto 
that such beneficial influences as education, hygiene, and social 
refinement had a cumulative action, and would of themselves 
lead to a steady improvement of all civilized races. This view 

1 Hiram M. Stanley in the Arena. 
IX [2] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

rested on the belief that whatever improvement was effected in 
individuals was transmitted to their progeny, and that it would 
be thus possible to effect a continuous advance in physical, 
moral, and intellectual qualities without any selection of the 
better or ehmination of the inferior types. But of late years 
grave doubts have been thrown on this view, owing chiefly to the 
researches of Galton and Weismann as to the fundamental 
causes to which heredity is due. The balance of opinion among 
physiologists now seems to be against the heredity of any quah- 
ties acquired by the individual after birth, in which case the 
question we are discussing will be much simphfied, since we 
shall be limited to some form of selection as the only possible 
means of improving the race. 

In order to make the difference between the two theories 
clear to those who may not have followed the recent discussions 
on the subject, an illustration may be useful. Let us suppose 
two persons, each striving to produce two distinct types of horse 
— the cart-horse and the racer— from the wild prairie horses of 
America, and that one of them beheves in the influence of food 
and training, the other in selection. Each has a lot of a hundred 
horses to begin with, as nearly as possible alike in quality. The 
one who trusts to selection at once divides his horses into two 
lots, the one stronger and heavier, the other lighter and more 
active, and, breeding from these, continually selects, for the 
parents of the succeeding generation, those which most nearly 
approach the two types required. In this way it is perfectly cer- 
tain that in a comparatively short period — thirty or forty years 
perhaps — he would be able to produce two very distinct forms, 
the one a very fair racehorse, the other an equally good specimen 
of a cart-horse; and he could do this without subjecting the two 
strains to any difference of food or training, since it is by selec- 
tion alone that our various breeds of domestic animals have in 
most cases been produced. 

On the other hand, the person who undertook to produce 
similar results by food and training alone, without allowing 
selection to have any part in the process, would have to act in a 
very different manner. He should first divide his horses into 
two lots as nearly as possible identical in all points, and there- 

IX [3] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

after subject the one lot to oaily exercise in drawing loads at a 
slow pace, the other lot to equally constant exercise in running, 
and he might also supply them with different kinds of food if he 
thought it calculated to aid in producing the required effect. In 
each successive generation he must make no selection of the 
swiftest or the strongest, but must either keep the whole progeny 
of each lot, or carefully choose an average sample of each to be 
again subjected to the same discipline. It is quite certain that 
the very different kinds of exercise would have some effect on the 
individuals so trained, enlarging and strengthening a different set 
of muscles in each, and if this effect were transmitted to the off- 
spring then there ought to be in this case also a steady advance 
toward the racer and the cart-horse type. Such an experiment, 
however, has never been tried, and we cannot therefore say posi- 
tively what would be the result ; but those who accept the theory 
of the non-heredity of acquired characters would predict with 
confidence that after thirty or forty generations of training with- 
out selection, the last two lots of colts would have made little or 
no advance toward the two types required, but would be practi- 
cally indistinguishable. 

It is exceedingly difficult to find any actual cases to illustrate 
this point, since either natural or artificial selection has almost 
always been present. The apparent effects of disuse in causing 
the diminution of certain organs, such as the reduced wings of 
some birds in oceanic islands and the very small or aborted eyes 
of some of the animals inhabiting extensive caverns, can be as 
well explained by the withdrawal of the cumulative agency of 
natural selection and by economy of growth, as by the direct 
effects of disuse. The following facts, however, seem to show that 
special skill derived from practice, when continued for several 
generations, is not inherited, and does not therefore tend to in- 
crease. The wonderful skill of most of the North American 
Indians in following a trail by indications quite imperceptible to 
the ordinary European has been dwelt upon by many writers, 
but it is now admitted that the white trappers equal and often 
excel them, though these trappers have in almost every case 
acquired their skill in a comparatively short period, without any 
of the inherited experience supposed to belong to the Indian. 
IX [4] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

Again, for many generations a considerable proportion of the 
male population of Switzerland has practised rifle-shooting as a 
national sport, yet in international contests they show no marked 
superiority over our riflemen, who are, in a large proportion, the 
sons of men who never handled a gun. Another case is afforded 
by the upper classes of this country who for many generations 
have been educated at the universities, and have had their classi- 
cal and mathematical abilities developed to the fullest extent by 
rivalry for honors. Yet now, that for some years these institu- 
tions have been opened to dissenters whose parents usually for 
many generations have had no such training, it is found that 
these dissenters carry off their full share or even more than their 
share of honors. We thus see that the theory of the non-heredity 
of acquired characters, whether physical or mental, is supported 
by a considerable number of facts, while few if any are directly 
opposed to it. We therefore propose to neglect the influence of 
education and habit as possible factors in the improvement of our 
race, and to confine our argument entirely to the possibility of 
improvement by some form of selection.^ 

PROPOSALS FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE RACE 

Among the modern writers who have dealt with this question 
the opinions of Mr. Galton are entitled to be first considered, 
because he has studied the whole subject of human faculty in the 
most thorough manner, and has perhaps thrown more light upon 
it than any other writer. The method of selection by which he 
has suggested that our race may be improved is to be brought 
into action by means of a system of marks for family merit, both 
as to health, intellect, and morals, those individuals who stand 
high in these respects being encouraged to marry early by state 
endowments sufficient to enable the young couples to make a 
start in life. Of all the proposals that have been made tending 
to the systematic improvement of our race, this is one of the 
least objectionable, but it is also I fear among the least effective. 
Its tendency would undoubtedly be to increase the number and 
to raise the standard of our highest and best men, but it would at 
the same time leave the bulk of the population unaffected, and 

^ Those who desire more information on this subject should read 
Weismann's Essays on Heredity. 

IX [5] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

would but slightly diminis^he rate at which the lower types 
tend to supplant or to take the place of the higher. What we 
want is, not a higher standard of perfection in the few, but a 
higher average, and this can best be produced by the ehmination 
of the lowest of all and a free interminghng of the rest. 

Something of this kind is proposed by Mr. Hiram M. Stanley 
in his article on "Our Civilization and the Marriage Problem," 
already referred to. This writer beheves that civilizations 
perish because, as wealth and art increase, corruption creeps in, 
and the new generations fail in the work of progress because the 
renewal of individuals is left chiefly to the unfit. The two great 
factors which secure perfection in each animal race — sexual 
selection by which the fit are born, and natural selection by 
which the fittest survive — both fail in the case of mankind, 
among whom are hosts of individuals which in any other class of 
beings would never have been born, or, if born, would never sur- 
vive. He argues that, unless some effective measures are soon 
adopted and strictly enforced, our case will be irremediable ; and, 
since natural selection fails so largely, recourse must be had to 
artificial selection. "The drunkard, the criminal, the diseased, 
the morally weak should never come into society. Not reform, 
but prevention, should be the cry." The method by which this 
is proposed to be done is hinted at in the following passages: 
" In the true golden age, which lies not behind but before us, the 
privilege of parentage will be esteemed an honor for the com- 
paratively few, and no child will be born who is not only sound in 
body and mind, but also above the average as to natural ability 
and moral force"; and again, "The most important matter in 
society, the inherent quality of the members which compose it, 
should be regulated by trained specialists." 

Of this proposal and all of the same character we may say 
that nothing can possibly be more objectionable, even if we ad- 
mit that they might be effectual in securing the object aimed at. 
But even this is more than doubtful; and it is quite certain that 
any such interference with personal freedom in matters so deeply 
affecting individual happiness will never be adopted by the 
majority of any nation, or if adopted would never be submitted 
to by the minority without a lif e-and-death struggle. 
IX [6] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

Another popular writer of the greatest ability and originality, 
who has recently given us his solution of the problem, is Mr. 
Grant Allen. His suggestion is in some respects the very re- 
verse of the last, yet it is, if possible, even more objectionable. 
Instead of any interference with personal freedom he proposes 
the entire abolition of legal restrictions as to marriage, which is 
to be a free contract, to last only so long as either party desires. 
This alone, however, would have no effect on race-improvement, 
except probably a prejudicial one. The essential part of his 
method is that girls should be taught, both by direct education 
and by the influence of public opinion, that the duty of all healthy 
and intellectual women is to be mothers of as many and as per- 
fect children as possible. For this purpose they are recom- 
mended to choose as temporary husbands the finest, healthiest, 
and most intellectual men, thus insuring a variety of combina- 
tions of parental qualities which would lead to the production of 
offspring of the highest possible character and to the continual 
advancement of the race.^ 

I think I have fairly summarized the essence of Mr. Grant 
Allen's proposal, which, though enforced with all his hterary 
skill and piquancy of illustration, can, in my opinion, only be 
fitly described by the term already applied to it by one of his 
reviewers, "detestable." It purports to be advanced in the 
interests of the children and of the race ; but it would necessarily 
impair that family life and parental affection which are the prime 
essentials to the well-being of children ; while, though it need not 
necessarily produce, it would certainly favor, the increase of pure 
sensuahsm, the most degrading and most fatal of all the quali- 
ties that tend to the deterioration of races and the downfall of 
nations. One of the modern American advocates of greater 
Hberty of divorce, in the interest of marriage itself, thus admir- 
ably summarizes the essential characteristics and purport of true 
marriage: " In a true relation, the chief object is the loving com- 
panionship of man and woman, their capacity for mutual help 
and happiness, and for the development of all that is noblest in 
each other. The second object is the building up a home and 
family, a place of rest, peace, security, in which child-hfe can 
* See The Girl of the Future in The Universal Review. 

IX [7] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

bud and blossom like flowers in the sunshine."^ For such rest, 
peace, and security, permanence is essential. This permanence 
need not be attained by rigid law, but by the influence of public 
opinion, and, more surely still, by those deep-seated feelings and 
emotions which, under favorable conditions, render the marriage 
tie stronger and its influence more beneficial the longer it en- 
dures. To me it appears that no system of the relations of men 
and women could be more fatal to the happiness of individuals, 
the well-being of children, or the advancement of the race, than 
that proposed by Mr. Grant Allen. 

OBJECTIONS TO ALL THE PRECEDING PROPOSALS 

Before proceeding further with the main question it is neces- 
sary to point out that, besides the special objections to each of the 
proposals here noticed, there is a general and fundamental ob- 
jection. They all attempt to deal at once, and by direct legisla- 
tive enactment, with the most important and most vital of all 
human relations, regardless of the fact that our present phase of 
social development is not only extremely imperfect, but vicious 
and rotten at the core. How can it be possible to determine and 
settle the relations of women to men which shall be best alike for 
individuals and for the race, in a society in which a very large 
proportion of women are obliged to work long hours daily for the 
barest subsistence, while another large proportion are forced into 
more or less uncongenial marriages as the only means of securing 
some amount of personal independence or physical well-being? 
Let any one consider, on the one hand, the lives of the wealthy as 
portrayed in the society papers and, on the other hand, the terri- 
ble condition of millions of workers — men, women, and children 
— and the still more awful condition of those who seek work of 
any kind in vain, and, seeing their children slowly dying of 
starvation, are driven in utter helplessness and despair to murder 
and suicide. Can any thoughtful person admit for a moment 
that, in a society so constituted that these overwhelming con- 
trasts of luxury and privation are looked upon as necessities, and 
are treated by the Legislature as matters with which it has prac- 
tically nothing to do, there is the smallest probability that we can 
* Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in the Arena. 

IX [8] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

deal successfully with such tremendous social problems as those 
which involve the marriage tie and the family relation as a means 
of promoting the physical and moral advancement of the race ? 
What a mockery to still further whiten the sepulchre of modern 
society, in which is hidden "all manner of corruption," with 
schemes for the moral and physical advancement of the race! 

SOCIAL ADVANCE WILL RESULT IN IMPROVEMENT OF CHARACTER 

It is my firm conviction, for reasons which I shall state pres- 
ently, that, when we have cleansed the Augean stable of our ex- 
isting social organization, and have made such arrangements 
that all shall contribute their share of eitlier physical or mental 
labor, and that all workers shall reap the lull and ec^ual reward of 
their work, the future of the race will be ensured by those laws of 
human development that have led to the slow but continuous 
advance in the higher quahties of human nature. When men 
and women are alike free to follow their best impulses; when 
idleness and vicious or useless luxury on the one hand, oppressive 
labor and starvation on the other, are alike unknown ; when all 
receive the best and most thorough education that the state of 
civihzation and knowledge at the time will admit; when the 
standard of public opinion is set by the wisest and the best, and 
that standard is systematically inculcated on the young — then we 
shall find that a system of selection will come spontaneously into 
action which will steadily tend to eliminate the lower and more 
degraded types of man, and thus continuously-raise the average 
standard of the race. I therefore strongly protest against any 
attempt to deal with this great question by legal enactments in 
our present state of unfitness and ignorance, or by endeavoring 
to modify public opinion as to the beneficial character of monog- 
amy and permanence in marriage. That the existing popular 
opinion is the true one is well and briefly shown by Miss Chap- 
man in LippincoWs Magazine; and as her statement of the case 
expresses my own views, and will, I think, be approved by most 
thinkers on the subject, I here give it : 

" I. Nature plainly indicates permanent marriage as the true 
human relation. The young of the human pair need parental 
care and supervision for a great number of years. 
IX [ 9 ] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 



u 



2. Instinct is strongly on the side of indissoluble marriage. 
In proportion as men leave brutedom behind and enter into the 
fulness of their human heritage, they will cease to tolerate the 
idea of two or more living partners. 

"3. History shows conclusively that where divorce has been 
easy, licentiousness, disorder, and often complete anarchy have 
prevailed. The history of civilization is the history of advance 
in monogamy, of the fidelity of one man to one woman, and one 
woman to one man. 

"4. Science tells the same tale. Physiology and Hygiene 
point to temperance, not riot. Sociology shows how man, in 
spite of himself, is ever striving, through lower forms, upward, to 
the monogamic relation. 

"5. Experience demonstrates to every one of us, individually, 
the superiority of the indissoluble marriage. We know that, 
speaking broadly, marriages turn out well or ill in proportion as 
husband and wife are — let me not say loving — but loyal, sinking 
differences and even grievances for the sake of children and for 
the sake of example." 

We have now to consider what would be the probable effect 
of a condition of social advancement, the essential characteristics 
of which have been already hinted at, on the two great problems 
— the increase of population, and the continuous improvement of 
the race by some form of selection v/hich we have reason to 
beheve is the only method available. In order to make this 
clear, however, and in order that we may fully reahze the forces 
that would come into play in a just and rational state of society, 
such as may certainly be reahzed in the not distant future, it will 
be necessary to have a clear conception of its main character- 
istics. For this purpose, and without committing myself in any 
way to an approval of all the details of his scheme, I shall make 
use of Mr. Bellamy's clear and forcible picture of the society of 
the future, as he supposes it may exist in America in little more 
than a century hence.^ 

The essential principle on which society is supposed to be 
founded is that of a great family. As in a well-regulated modern 
family the elders, those who have experience of the labors, the 

^ Looking Backward. See specially, chapters vii, ix, xii, and xxv. . 
IX [ 10 ] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION. 

duties, and the responsibilities of life, determine the general 
mode of hving and working, witli the fullest consideration for the 
convenience and real well-being of the younger members, and 
with a recognition of their essential independence. As in a 
family, the same comforts and enjoyments are secured to all, and 
the very idea of making any difference in this respect, to those 
who from mental or physical disability are unable to do so much 
as others, never occurs to any one, since it is opposed to the essen- 
tial principles on which a true society of human brotherhood is 
held to rest. As regards education all have the same advan- 
tages, and all receive the fullest and best training, both intellec- 
tual and physical; every one is encouraged to follow out those 
studies or pursuits for which they are best fitted, or for which 
they exhibit the strongest inclination. This education, the com- 
plete and thorough training for a life of usefulness and enjoy- 
ment, continues in both sexes till the age of twenty-one (or there- 
abouts), when all alike, men and women, take their place in the 
lower ranks of the industrial army in which they serve for three 
years. During the latter years of their education, and during 
the succeeding three years of industrial service, every opportunity 
is given them to see and understand every kind of work that is 
carried on by the community, so that at the end of the term of 
probation they can choose what department of the public service 
they prefer to enter. As every one — men, women, and children 
ahkc — receive the same amount of public credit — their equal 
share of the products of the labor of the community, the attrac- 
tiveness of various pursuits is equaHzed by differences in the 
hours of labor, in holidays, or in special privileges attached to the 
more disagreeable kinds of necessary work, and these are so 
modified from time to time that the volunteers for every occupa- 
tion are always about equal to its requirements. The only other 
essential feature that it is necessary to notice for our present pur- 
pose is the system of grades, by which good conduct, persever- 
ance, and intelligence in every department of industry and occu- 
pation are fully recognized, and lead to appointments as foremen, 
superintendents, or general managers, and ultimately to the 
highest offices of the state. Every one of these grades and ap- 
pointments is made public; and as they constitute the only 
IX [ii] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

honors and the only differences of rank, with corresponding in- 
signia and privileges, in an otherwise equal body of citizens, they 
are highly esteemed, and serve as ample inducements to industry 
and zeal in the pubhc service. 

At first sight it may appear that in any state of society whose 
essential features were at all hke those here briefly outHned, all 
the usual restraints to early marriage as they now exist would be 
removed, and that a rate of increase of the pojnilation unex- 
ampled in any previous era would be the result, leading in a few 
generations to a difficulty in obtaining subsistence, which Mal- 
thus has shown to be the inevitable result of the normal rate of 
increase of mankind when all the positive as well as the preven- 
tive checks are removed. As the positive checks — which may be 
briefly summarized as war, pestilence, and famine — are sup- 
posed to be non-existent, what, it may be asked, are the preven- 
tive checks which are suggested as being capable of reducing the 
rate of increase within manageable limits? This very reason- 
able question I will now endeavor to answer. 

NATURAL CHECKS TO RAPID INCREASE 

The first and most important of the checks upon a too rapid 
increase of population will be the comparatively late average 
period of marriage, which will be the natural result of the very 
conditions of society, and will besides be inculcated during the 
period of education, and still further enforced by pubhc opinion. 
As the period of systematic education is supposed to extend to 
the age of twenty-one, up to which time both the mental and 
physical powers will be trained and exercised to their fullest 
capacity, th? idea of marriage during this period will rarely be 
entertained. During the last year of education, however, the 
subject of marriage will be dwelt upon, in its bearing on individ- 
ual happiness and on social well-being, in relation to the welfare 
of the next generation and to the continuous development of the 
race. The most careful and dehberate choice of partners for 
life will be inculcated as the highest social duty; while the young 
women will be so trained as to look with scorn and loathing on all 
men who in any way wilfully fail in their duty to society — on 
idlers and malingerers, on drunkards and hars, on the selfish, the 
IX [ 12 ] 






THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

cruel, or the vicious. They will be taught that the happiness of 
their whole lives will depend on the care and dehberation with 
which they choose their husbands, and they will be urged to 
accept no suitor till he has proved himself to be worthy of respect 
by the place he holds and the character he bears among his 
fellow-laborers in the public service. 

Under social conditions which render every woman abso- 
lutely independent, so far as the necessaries and comforts of 
existence are concerned, surrounded by the charms of family life 
and the pleasures of society, which will be far greater than any- 
thing we now realize when all will possess the refinements de- 
rived from the best possible education, and all will be reheved 
from sordid cares and the struggle for mere existence, is it not in 
the highest degree probable that marriage will rarely take place 
till the woman has had three or four years' experience of the 
world after leaving college — that is, till the age of 25, while it will 
very frequently be delayed till 30 or upward ? Now Mr. Galton 
has shown, from the best statistics available, that if we compare 
women married at 20 with those married at 29, the proportionate 
fertility is about as 8 to 5. But this difference, large as it is, only 
represents a portion of the effect on the rate of increase of popu- 
lation caused by a delay in the average period of marriage. For 
when the age of marriage is delayed the time between successive 
generations is correspondingly lengthened ; while a still further 
effect is produced by the fact that the greater the average age of 
marriage the fewer generations are alive at the same time, and it 
is the combined effect of these three factors that determines the 
actual rate of increase of the population.* 

But there is yet another factor tending to check the increase 
of population that would come into play in a society such as we 
have been considering. In a remarkable essay on the Theory of 
Population, Herbert Spencer has shown, by an elaborate discus- 
sion of the phenomena presented by the whole animal kingdom, 
that the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the 
race vary inversely, those species and groups which have the 
shortest and most uncertain hves producing the greatest number 

*See Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, p. 321 ; and 
Hereditary Genius, p. 353. 

IX [13] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

of oflfspring; in other words, individuation and reproduction are 
antagonistic. But individuation depends almost entirely on the 
development and speciahzation of the nervous system, through 
which, not only are the several activities and co-ordinations of 
the various organs carried on, but all advance in instinct, 
emotion, and intellect is rendered possible. The actual rate of 
increase in man has been determined by the necessities of the 
savage state, in which, as in most animal species, it has usually 
been only just sufficient to maintain a hmited average popula- 
tion. But with civilization the average duration of Hf e increases 
and the possible increase of population under favorable condi- 
■ tions becomes very great, because f ertiHty is greater than is 
needed under the new conditions. The advance in civiUzation 
as regards the preservation of hf e has in recent times become so 
rapid, and the increased development of the nervous system has 
been hmited to so small a portion of the whole population, that 
no general diminution in fertility has yet occurred. That the 
facts do, however, accord with the theory is indicated by the 
common observation that highly intellectual parents do not as a 
rule have large famihes, while the most rapid increase occurs in 
those classes which are engaged in the simpler kinds of manual 
labor. But in a state of society in which all will have their 
higher faculties fully cultivated and fully exercised throughout 
life, a shght general diminution of fertility would at once arise, 
and this diminution added to that caused by the later average 
period of marriage would at once bring the rate of increase of 
population within manageable Hmits. The same general princi- 
ple enables us to look forward to that distant future when the 
world will be fully peopled, in perfect confidence that an equilib- 
rium between the birth and death rates will then be brought 
about by a combination of physical and social agencies, and the 
bugbear of over-population become finally extinct.^ 

HOW NATURAL SELECTION WILL IMPROVE THE RACE 

There now only remains for consideration the means by 
which, in such a society, a continuous improvement of the race 

* See A Theory of Population deduced from the General Law of Animal 
Fertility. 

IX [ 14 ] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

could be brought about, on the assumption that for this purpose 
education is powerless as a direct agency, since its effects are not 
hereditary, and that some form of selection is an absolute ne- 
cessity. This improvement I beheve will certainly be eft'ected 
through the agency of female choice in marriage. Let us, there- 
fore, consider how this would probably act. 

It will be generally admitted that, although many women now 
remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there 
are always a considerable number who feel no strong inclination 
to marriage, and who accept husbands to secure a subsistence or 
a home of their own rather than from personal affection or 
sexual emotion. In a society in which women were all pecun- 
iarily independent, were all fully occupied with pubHc duties and 
intellectual or social enjoyments, and had nothing to gain by 
marriage as regards material well-being, we may be sure that the 
number of the unmarried from choice would largely increase. 
It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any 
w^oman to marry a man she could not both love and esteem, and 
this feeling would supply ample reasons for either abstaining 
from marriage altogether or delaying it till a worthy and sympa- 
thetic husband was encountered. In man, on the other hand, 
the passion of love is more general, and usually stronger ; and as 
in such a society as is here postulated there would be no way of 
gratifying this passion but by marriage, almost every woman 
would receive offers, and thus a powerful selective agency would 
rest with the female sex. Under the system of education and of 
pubhc opinion here suggested there can be no doubt how this selec- 
tion would be exercised. The idle and the selfish would be almost 
universally rejected. The diseased or the weak in intellect would 
also usually remain unmarried ; while those who exhibited any 
tendency to insanity or to hereditary disease, or who possessed 
any congenital deformity would in hardly any case find part- 
ners, because it would be considered an offence against society to 
be the means of perpetuating such diseases or imperfections. 

We must also take into account a special factor hitherto, I 
believe, unnoticed in this connection, that would in all proba- 
bility intensify the selection thus exercised. It is well known 
that females are largely in excess of males in our existing popula- 
IX [15] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

tion, and this fact, if it were a necessary and permanent one, 
would tend to weaken the selective agency of women, as it un- 
doubtedly does now. But there is good reason to believe that it 
will not be a permanent feature of our population. The births 
indicate a natural tendency in the opposite direction, since they 
always give a larger proportion of males than females, varying 
from 3|- to 4 per cent. But boys now die so much more rapidly 
than girls that when we include all under the age of five the 
numbers are nearly equal. For the next five years the mor- 
tahty is nearly the same in both sexes ; then that of females pre- 
ponderates up to 30 years of age, then up to 60 that of men is the 
larger, while for the rest of life female mortality is again greatest. 
The general result is that at the ages of most frequent marriage — 
from 20 to 35 — females are between 8 and 9 per cent, in excess of 
males. But during the ages from 5 to 35 we find a wonderful 
excess of male deaths from two preventible causes — "accident" 
and "violence." For a recent year the deaths from these causes 
in England and Wales was as follows : — 

Males (5 to 35 years) 4,158 

Females (s to 35 years) 1,100 

Here we have an excess of male over female deaths in one 
year of 3,058, all between the ages of 5 and 35, a very large por- 
tion of which is no doubt due to the greater risks run by men and 
boys in various industrial occupations, in sport, and in war. In 
a state of society in which the bulk of the population were en- 
gaged in industrial work, and were all social equals, it is quite 
certain that almost all these deaths would be prevented, thus 
bringing the male population more nearly to an equahty with the 
female. But there are also many unhealthy employments in 
which men are exclusively or more largely engaged, such as the 
grinders of Sheffield, and many others; and many more men 
have their lives shortened by labor in unventilatcd workshops, 
to say nothing of the loss of life at sea and in war. When the 
lives of all its citizens are accounted of equal value to the com- 
munity, no one will be allowed to suffer from such preventible 
causes as these; and this will still further reduce the mortahty of 
men as compared with that of women. On the whole, then, it 
seems highly probable that in the society of the future the supe- 
IX [ 16 ] 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

rior numbers of males at birth will be maintained throughout hfe, 
or, at all events, during what may be termed the marriageable 
period. This will greatly increase the influence of women in the 
improvement of the race. Being a minority they will be more 
sought after, and will have a real choice in marriage, which is 
rarely the case now. This actual minority being further in- 
creased by those who, from the various causes already referred 
to, abstain from marriage, will cause considerable numbers of 
men to remain permanently unmarried, and as these will consist 
very largely, if not almost wholly, of those who are the least per- 
fectly developed either mentally or physically, the constant ad- 
vance of the race in every good quahty will be insured. 

This method of improvement, by elimination of the worst, 
has many advantages over that of securing the early marriages of 
the best. In the first place it is the direct instead of the indirect 
way, for it is more important and more beneficial to society to 
improve the average of its members by getting rid of the lowest 
types than by raising the highest a little higher. Exceptionally 
great and good men are always produced in sufficient numbers, 
and have always been so produced in every phase of civilization. 
We do not need more of these so much as we need less of the 
weak and the bad. This weeding- out system has been the 
method of natural selection, by which the animal and vegetable 
worlds have been improved and developed. The survival of the 
fittest is really the extinction of the unfit. In nature this occurs 
perpetually on an enormous scale, because, owing to the rapid 
increase of most organisms, the unfit which are yearly destroyed 
form a large proportion of those that are born. Under our 
hitherto imperfect civilization this wholesome process has been 
checked as regards mankind ; but the check has been the result 
of the development of the higher attributes of our nature. 
Humanity — the essentially human emotion — has caused us to 
save the lives of the weak and sufi'ering, of the maimed or im- 
perfect in mind or body. This has to some extent been antago- 
nistic to physical and even intellectual race-improvement ; but it 
has improved us morally by the continuous development of the 
characteristic and crowning grace of our human as distinguished 
from our animal nature. 

IX [i7j 



THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 

In the society of the future this defect will be remedied, not 
by any diminution of our humanity, but by encouraging the ac- 
tivity of a still higher human characteristic — admiration of all 
that is beautiful and kindly and self-sacrificing, repugnance to 
all that is selfish, base, or cruel. When we allow ourselves to be 
guided by reason, justice, and pubUc spirit in our dealings with 
our fellow-men, and determine to abohsh poverty by recognizing 
the equal rights of all the citizens of our common land to an 
equal share of the wealth which all combine to produce — when 
we have thus solved the lesser problem of a rational social organi- 
zation adapted to secure the equal well-being of all, then we may 
safely leave the far greater and deeper problem of the improve- 
ment of the race to the cultivated minds and pure instincts of the 
men, and especially of the Women of the Future. 



IK [18] 



X 



THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE 

"SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION AND PROGRESS" 



BY 

IRA REMSEN 

PRESIDENT OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 



TTAVING traced the thoughts of science as they apply to 
-'--'- man, as they enable us to understand the progress and 
perhaps the origin of our race, we are ready now to turn to the 
latest achievements oj the investigators, to question what they 
are doing for us to-day, and what they hope and promise to do 
for us to-morrow. The recent develop?nents of science have 
been, as we all know, marvellous. Has it "reached its term'^? 
Or does it see opening before it a future even more brilliant 
than its past ? To guide us in this question, we need, not the 
vague enthusiasm of the dreamer, but the practical analysis 
and calm judgment of the expert. Let us therefore seek for 
information from one among the foremost of our American 
authorities. 

The following address was delivered by President Remsen 
before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
oj which distinguished body he was made president in ipoj. 
Dr. Remsen has been professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins 
University for over thirty years, and since igo2 has been presi- 
dent of that celebrated institution. It is however not so much 
to his high official position as to his valuable research work 
that Dr. Remsen owes his noteworthy place among the leaders 
oj modern science. 

X [I] 



THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE 



l^ 



At the weekly services of many of our churches it is cus- 
tomary to begin with the reading of a verse or two from the 
Scriptures for the purpose, I suppose, of putting the congrega- 
tions in the proper state of mind for the exercises which are 
to follow. It seems to mc that we may profit by this ex- 
ample, and accordingly I ask your attention to Article i of 
the Constitution of the American Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Science, which reads thus: "The objects of the 
association are, by periodical and migratory meetings, to pro- 
mote intercourse between those who are cultivating science 
in different parts of America, to give stronger and more general 
impulse and more systematic direction to scientific research, 
and to procure for the labors of scientific men increased fa- 
cilities and a wider usefulness." 

The first object mentioned, you will observe, is "to pro- 
mote intercourse between those who are cultivating science 
in different parts of America"; the second is "to give a stronger 
and more general impulse and more systematic direction to 
scientific research"; and the third is "to procure for the 
labors of scientific men increased facihties and a wider use- 
fulness." Those who are famihar with the history of the 
association are well aware that it has served its purposes ad- 
mirably, and I am inchncd to think that those who have been 
in the habit of attending its meetings will agree that the ob- 
ject .which appeals to them most strongly is the promotion 
of intercourse between those who are cultivating science. 
Given this intercourse and the other objects will be reached 
as a necessary consequence, for the intercourse stimulates 
thought, and thought leads to work, and work leads to wider 
usefulness. 

While in 1848, when the association was organized and 
the constitution was adopted, there was a fair number of good 
scientific investigators in this country, it is certain that in the 
half-century that has passed since then the number of inves- 
tigators has increased very largely, and naturally the amount 
of scientific work done at present is very much greater than 
it was at that time. So great has been the increase in scien- 
tific activity during recent years, that we are apt to think 
X [2] 



THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE 

that by comparison scientific research is a new acquisition. 
In fact there appears to be an impression abroad that in the 
world at large scientific research is a relatively new thing, for 
which we of this generation and our immediate predecessors 
are largely responsible. Only a superficial knowledge of the 
history of science is necessary, however, to show that the 
sciences have been developed slowly, and that their beginnings 
are to be looked for in the very earliest times. Everything 
seems to point to the conclusion that men have been always 
engaged in efforts to learn more and more in regard to the 
world in which they find themselves. Sometimes they have 
been guided by one motive and sometimes by another, but 
the one great underlying motive has been the desire to get 
a clearer and clearer understanding of the universe.^ But 
besides this there has been the desire to find means of in- 
creasing the comfort and happiness of the human race. 

A reference to the history of chemistry will serve to show 
how these motives have operated side by side. One of the 
first great incentives for working with chemical things was 
the thought that it was possible to convert base metals like 
lead and copper into the so-called noble metals, silver and 
gold. Probably no idea has ever operated as strongly as this 
upon the minds of men to lead them to undertake chemical 
experiments. It held control of intellectual men for cen- 
turies, and it was not until about a hundred years ago that 
it lost its hold. It is very doubtful if the purely scientific 
question, whether one form of matter can be transformed into 
another, would have had the power to control the activities 
of investigators for so long a time; and it is idle to speculate 
upon this subject. It should, however, be borne in mind 
that many of those who were engaged in this work were ac- 
tuated by a desire to put money in their purses — a desire 
that is by no means to be condemned without reserve, and 
I mention it not for the purpose of condemning it, but to show 
that a motive that we sometimes think of as peculiarly modern 
is among the oldest known to man. 

While the alchemists were at work upon their problems, 
another class of chemists were engaged upon problems of 
X [3] 



THE LATESIl KNOWLEDGE 

an entirely different nature. The fact that substances ob- 
tained from various natural sources and others made in the 
laboratory produce effects of various kinds when taken into 
the system, led to the thought that these substances might 
be useful in the treatment of disease. Then, further, it was 
thought that disease itself is a chemical phenomenon. These 
thoughts, as is evident, furnish strong motives for the inves- 
tigation of chemical substances, and the science of chemistry 
owes much to the work of those who were guided by these 
motives. 

And so in each period as a new thought has served as 
the guide we find that men have been actuated by different 
motives, and often one and the same worker has been under 
the influence of mixed motives. Only in a few cases does it 
appear that the highest motives alone operate. We must 
take men as we find them, and we may be thankful that on 
the whole there are so many who are impelled by one mo- 
tive or another, or by a mixture of motives to take up the 
work of investigating the world in which we five. Great 
progress is being made in consequence and almost daily we 
are called upon to wonder at some new and marvellous re- 
sult of scientific investigation. It is quite impossible to make 
predictions of value in regard to what is likely to be revealed 
to us by continued work, but it is safe to beheve that in our 
efforts to discover the secrets of the universe, only a begin- 
ning has been made. No matter in what direction we may 
look we are aware of great unexplored territories, and even 
in those regions in which the greatest advances have been 
made it is evident that the knowledge gained is almost in- 
significant as compared with that which remains to be learned. 
But this line of thought may lead to a condition bordering 
on hopelessness and despondency, and surely we should avoid 
this condition, for there is much greater cause for rejoicing 
than for despair. Our successors will see more, and see 
more clearly than we do, just as we see more and see more 
clearly than our predecessors. It is our duty to keep the 
work going without being too anxious to weigh the results 
on an absolute scale. It must be remembered that the ab- 
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solute scale is not a very sensitive instrument, and that it 
requires the results of generations to affect it markedly. 

On an occasion of this kind it seems fair to ask the ques- 
tion, What does the world gain by scientific investigation? 
This question has often been asked and often answered, but 
each answer differs in some respects from the others, and 
each may be suggestive and worth giving. The question is 
a profound one, and no answer that can be given would be 
satisfactory. In general it may be said that the results of 
scientific investigation fall under three heads — the material, 
the intellectual, and the ethical. 

The m^aterial results are the most obvious and they nat- 
urally receive the most attention. The material wants of man 
are the first to receive consideration. They can not be neg- 
lected. He must have food and clothing, the means of com- 
bating disease, the means of transportation, the means of 
producing heat, and a great variety of things that contribute 
to his bodily comfort and gratify his 8esthetic desires. It 
is not my purpose to attempt to deal with all of these and to 
show how science is helping to work out the problems sug- 
gested. I shall have to content myself by pointing out a few 
of the more important problems, the solution of which de- 
pends upon the prosecution of scientific research. 

First, the food problem. Whatever views one may hold 
in regard to that which has come to be called "race suicide," 
it appears that the population of the world is increasing rapidly. 
The desirable places have been occupied. In some parts of 
the earth there is such a surplus of population that famines 
occur from time to time, and in other parts epidemics and 
floods relieve the embarrassment. We may fairly look for- 
ward to the time when the whole earth will be overpopulated, 
unless the production of food becomes more scientific than 
it now is. Here is the field for the work of the agricultural 
chemist, who is showing us how to increase the yield from a 
given area, and, in case of poor and worn-out soils, how to 
preserve and increase their fertility. It appears that the 
methods of cultivating the soil are still comparatively crude, 
and more and more thorough investigation of the processes 
X [5] 



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involved in the growth of plants is called for. Much has 
been learned since Liel^ig founded the science of agricultural 
chemistry. It was he who pointed out some of the ways by 
which it is possible to increase the fertihty of a soil. Since 
the results of his investigations were given to the world, the 
use of artificial fertilizers has become more and more general. 

But it is one thing to know that artificial fertilizers are 
useful, and it is quite another thing to get them. At first 
bone dust and guano were chiefly used. Then as these be- 
came dearer, phosphates, and potassium salts from the mineral 
kingdom came into use. 

At the Fifth International Congress for Applied Chemistry, 
held at Berlin, Germany, in 1903, Dr. Adolph Frank, of Char- 
lottenburg, gave an extremely interesting address on the sub- 
ject of the use of the nitrogen of the atmosphere for agricul- 
ture and the industries, which bears upon the problem that 
we are dealing with. Plants must have nitrogen. At present 
this is obtained from the great beds of saltpetre found on the 
west coast of South America — the so-called Chili saltpetre — 
and also from the ammonia abtained as a by-product in the 
distillation of coal, especially in the manufacture of coke. 
The use of Chili saltpetre for agricultural purposes began 
about i860. In 1900 the quantity exported was 1,453,000 
tons, and its value was about $60,000,000. In the same year 
the world's production of ammonium sulphate was about 
500,000 tons, of a value of somewhat more than $20,000,000. 
Of these enormous quantities about three-quarters finds ap- 
plication in agriculture. The use of these substances, espe- 
cially of saltpetre, is increasing rapidly. At present it seems 
that the successful cultivation of the soil is dependent upon 
the use of nitrates, and the supply of nitrates is Umited. Un- 
less something is done we may look forward to the time when 
the earth, for lack of proper fertilizers, will not be able to 
produce as much as it now does, and meanwhile the demand 
for food is increasing. According to the most reliable esti- 
mations, indeed, the saltpetre beds will be exhausted in thirty 
or forty years. Is there a way out? Dr. Frank shows that 
there is. In the air there is nitrogen for all. The plants 
X [6] 



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can make only a limited use of this directly. For the most 
part it must be in some form of chemical combination, as, for 
example, a nitrate of ammonia. The conversion of atmos- 
pheric nitrogen into nitric acid would solve the problem, and 
this is now carried out. But Dr. Frank shows that there is 
another, perhaps more economical, way of getting the nitro- 
gen into a form suitable for plant food. Calcium carbide 
can now be made without difficulty, and is made in enormous 
quantities by the action of a powerful electric current upon 
a mixture of coal and lime. This substance has the power 
of absorbing nitrogen from the air, and the product thus formed 
appears to be capable of giving up its nitrogen to plants, or, 
in other words, to be a good fertiHzer. It is true that this 
subject requires further investigation, but the results thus far 
obtained are full of promise. If the outcome should be what 
we have reason to hope, we may regard the approaching ex- 
haustion of the saltpetre beds with equanimity. But, even 
without this to pin our faith to, we have the preparation of 
nitric acid from the nitrogen and oxygen of the air to fall 
back upon. 

While speaking of the food problem, a few words in re- 
gard to the artificial preparation of foodstuffs. I am sorry 
to say that there is not much of promise to report upon in this 
connection. In spite of the brilhant achievements of chemists 
in the field of synthesis, it remains true that thus far they 
have not been able to make, except in very small quantities, 
substances that are useful as foods, and there is absolutely 
no prospect of this result being reached within a reasonable 
time. A few years ago Berthelot told us of a dream he had 
had. This has to do with the results that, according to Ber- 
thelot, are to be brought about by the advance of chemistry. 
The results of investigations already accomplished indicate 
that, in the future, methods will perhaps be devised for the 
artificial preparation of food from the water and carbonic 
acid so abundantly supplied by nature. Agriculture will 
then become unnecessary, and the landscape will not be dis- 
figured by crops growing in geometrical figures. Water will 
be obtained from holes three or four miles deep in the earth, 
X [7] 



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and this water will be above the boiling temperature, so that 
it can be used as a source of energy. It will be obtained in 
liquid form after it has undergone a process of natural dis- 
tillation, which will free it from all impurities, including, of 
course, disease germs. The foods prepared by artificial meth- 
ods will also be free from microbes, and there will be, conse- 
quently, less disease than at present. Further, the necessity 
for kilHng animals for food will no longer exist, and man- 
kind will become gentler and more amenable to higher in- 
fluences. There is, no doubt, much that is fascinating in 
this line of thought, but whether it is worth following, de- 
pends upon the fundamental assumption. Is it at all prob- 
able that chemists will ever be able to devise methods for the 
artificial preparation of foodstuff's? I can only say that to 
me it does not appear probable in the light of the results thus 
far obtained. I do not mean to question the probabiUty of 
the ultimate synthesis of some of those substances that are 
of value as foods. This has been already accomplished on 
a small scale, but for the most part the synthetical processes 
employed have involved the use of substances which them- 
selves are the products of natural processes. Thus, the fats 
can be made, but the substances from which they are made 
are generally obtained from nature and are not themselves 
synthetical products. Emil Fischer has, to be sure, made 
very small quantities of sugars of different kinds, but the task 
of building up a sugar from the raw material furnished by 
nature — that is to say, from carbonic acid and water — pre- 
sents such difficulties that it may be said to be practically im- 
possible. 

When it comes to starch, and the proteids which are the 
other chief constituents of foodstuffs, the difficulties are still 
greater. There is not a suggestion of the possibility of making 
starch artificially, and the same is true of the proteids. In 
this connection it is, however, interesting to note that Emil 
Fischer, after his remarkable successes in the sugar group 
and the uric-acid group, is now advancing upon the proteids. 
I have heard it said that at the beginning of his career he made 
out a programme for his lifework. This included the solution 
X [8] 



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of three great problems. These are the determination of the 
constitution of uric acid, of the sugars, and of the proteids. 
Two of these problems have been solved. May he be equally 
successful with the third! Even if we should be able to make 
a proteid, and show what it is, the problem of the artificial 
preparation of foodstuffs will not be solved. Indeed, it v/ill 
hardly be affected. 

Although science is not likely, within periods that we may 
venture to think of, to do away with the necessity of cultivat- 
ing the soil, it is likely to teach us how to get more out of the 
soil than we now do, and thus put us in a position to provide 
for the generations that are to follow us. And this carries 
with it the thought that, unless scientific investigation is kept 
up, these coming generations will be unprovided for. 

Another way by which the food supply of the world can 
be increased is by relieving tracts of land that are now used 
for other purposes than the cultivation of foodstuffs. The 
most interesting example of this kind is that presented by the 
cultivation of indigo. There is a large demand for this sub- 
stance, which is plainly founded upon gesthetic desires of a 
somewhat rudimentary kind. Whatever the cause may be, 
the demand exists, and immense tracts of land have been and 
are still, devoted to the cultivation of the indigo plant. Within 
the past few years scientific investigation has shown that in- 
digo can be made in the factory from substances, the pro- 
duction of which does not for the most part involve the culti- 
vation of the soil. In 1900, according to the report of Dr. 
Brunck, managing director of the Badische Anilin- und Soda- 
Fabrik, the quantity of indigo produced annually in the fac- 
tory would, if grown from plants, "require the cultivation of 
an area of more than a quarter of a milHon acres of land (390 
square miles) in the home of the indigo plant (India)." Dr. 
Brunck adds: "The first impression- which this fact may be 
likely to produce is that the manufacture of indigo will cause 
a terrible calamity to arise in that country; but, perhaps not. 
If one recalls to mind that India is periodically afflicted with 
famine, one ought not, without further consideration, to cast 
aside the hope that it might be good fortune for that country 

X [9] 



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if the immense areas now devoted to a crop which is subjce'. 
to many vicissitudes and to violent market changes, were vA 
last to be given over to the raising of breadstuffs and other 
food products." "For myself," says Dr. Brunck, "I no not 
assume to be an impartial adviser in this matter, but, never- 
theless, I venture to express my convictions that the govern- 
ment of India will be rendering a very great service if it should 
support and aid the progress, which will in any case be irre- 
sistible, of this impending change in the cultivation of that 
country, and would support and direct its methodical and 
rational execution." 

The connection between scientific investigation and health 
is so frequently the subject of discussion that I need not dwell 
upon it here. The discovery that many diseases are due 
primarily to the action of microscopic organisms that find 
their way into the body and produce the changes that reveal 
themselves in definite symptoms, is a direct consequence of 
the study of the phenomenon of alcoholic fermentation by 
Pasteur. Everything that throws light upon the nature of 
the actions of these microscopic organisms is of value in deal- 
ing with the great problem of combating disease. It has been 
established in a number of cases that they cause the forma- 
tion of products that act as poisons and that the diseases are 
due to the action of these poisons. So also, as is well known, 
investigation has shown that antidotes to some of these poisons 
can be produced, and that by means of these antidotes the 
diseases can be controlled. But more important than this, 
is the discovery of the way in which diseases are transmitted. 
With this knowledge it is possible to prevent the diseases. 
The great fact that the death rate is decreasing stands out 
prominently and proclaims to humanity the importance of 
scientific investigation. It is, however, to be noted in this 
connection that the decrease in the death rate compensates 
to some extent for the decrease in the birth rate, and that, if 
an increase in population is a thing to be desired, the investi- 
gations in the field of sanitary science are contributing to this 
result. 

The development of the human race is dependent not alone 
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upon a supply of food, but upon a supply of energy in available 
forms. Heat and mechanical energy are absolutely essential 
to man. The chief source of the energy that comes into play 
is fuel. We are primarily dependent upon the coal supply 
for the continuation of the activities of man. Without this, 
unless something is to take its place, man is doomed. Sta- 
tistics in regard to the coal supply and the rate at which it is 
being used have so frequently been presented by those who 
have special knowledge of this subject, that I need not trouble 
you with them now. The only object in referring to it is to 
show that, unless by means of scientific investigation man is 
taught new methods of rendering the world's store of energy 
available for the production of heat and of motion, the age of 
the human race is measured by the extent of the supply of 
coal and other forms of fuel. By other forms of fuel I mean, 
of course, wood and oil. Plainly, as the demand for land for 
the production of foodstuffs increases, the amount available 
for the production of wood must decrease, so that wood need 
not be taken into account for the future. In regard to oil, 
our knowledge is not sufficient to enable us to make predictions 
of any value. If one of the theories now held in regard to the 
source of petroleum should prove to be correct, the world would 
find much consolation in it. According to this theory petroleum 
is not likely to be exhausted, for it is constantly being formed 
by the action of water upon carbides that in all probability 
exist in practically unlimited quantity in the interior of the 
earth. If this be true, then the problem of supplying energy 
may be reduced to one of transportation of oil. But given 
a supply of oil and, of course, the problem of transportation 
is solved. 

What are the other sources of practical energy? The 
most important is the fall of water. This is being utilized 
more and more year by year, since the methods of producing 
electric currents by means of the dynamo have been worked 
out. There is plainly much to be learned before the energy 
made available in the immediate neighborhood of the water- 
fall can be transported long distances economically, but ad- 
vances are being made in this line, and already factories that 
X [II J 



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have hitherto been dependent upon coal are making use of 
the energy derived from waterfalls. The more rapidly these 
advances take place the less will be the demand for coal, and 
if there were enough waterfalls conveniently situated, there 
would be no difficulty in furnishing all the energy needed by 
man for heat or for motion. 

It is a fortunate thing that, as the population of the earth 
increases, man's tastes become more complex. If only the 
simplest tastes prevailed, only the simplest occupations would 
be called for. But let us not lose time in idle speculations as 
to the way this primitive condition of things would affect man's 
progress. As a matter of fact his tastes are becoming more 
complex. Things that are not dreamed of in one generation 
become the necessities of the next generation. Many of these 
things are the direct results of scientific investigation. No 
end of examples will suggest themselves. Let me content 
myself by reference to one that has of late been the subject 
of much discussion. The development of the artificial dye- 
stuff industries is extremely instructive in many ways. The 
development has been the direct result of the scientific in- 
vestigation of things that seemed to have little, if anything, 
to do with this world. Many thousands of workmen are now 
employed, and many millions of dollars are invested, in the 
manufacture of dye-stuffs that were unknown a few years ago. 
Here plainly the fundamental fact is the aesthetic desire of man 
for colors. A colorless world would be unbearable to him. 
Nature accustoms him to color in a great variety of combina- 
tions, and it becomes a necessity to him. And his desires 
increase as they are gratified. There seems to be no end to 
development in this line. At all events, the data at our dis- 
posal justify the conclusion that there will be a demand for 
every dye that combines the qualities of beauty and dura- 
bility. Thousands of scientifically trained men are engaged 
to work in the effort to deliver nev/ dyes to meet the increasing 
demands. New industries are springing up, and many find 
employment in them. As a rule, the increased demand for 
labor caused by the establishment of these industries is not 
offset by the closing up of other industries. Certainly it is 
X [12] 



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true that scientific investigation has created large demands 
for labor that could hardly find employment without these 
demands. 

The welfare of a nation depends to a large extent upon the 
success of its industries. In his address as president of the 
British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Nor- 
man Lockyer quotes Mr. Chamberlain thus: "I do not think 
it is necessary for me to say anything as to the urgency and 
necessity of scientific training. ... It is not too much to 
say that the existence of this country as the great commercial 
nation depends upon it. . . . It depends very much upon 
what we are doing now, at the beginning of the twentieth 
century, whether at its end we shall continue to maintain our 
supremacy or even equality with our great commercial and 
manufacturing rivals." In another part of his address, Sir 
Norman Lockyer says: "Further, I am told that the sum of 
;;^24,ooo,ooo is less than half the amount by which Germany 
is yearly enriched by having improved upon our chemical 
industries, owing to our lack of scientific training. Many 
other industries have been attacked in the same way since, 
but taking this one instance alone, if we had spent this money 
fifty years ago, when the Prince Consort first called attention 
to our backwardness, the nation would now be much richer 
than it is, and would have much less to fear from competition." 

But enough on the purely material side. Let us turn to 
the intellectual results of scientific investigation. This part 
of our subject might be summed up in a few words. It is so 
obvious that the intellectual condition of mankind is a direct 
result of scientific investigation, that one hesitates to make 
the statement. The mind of man cannot carry him much 
in advance of his knowledge of the facts. Intellectual gains 
can be made only by discoveries, and discoveries can be made 
only by investigation. One generation differs from another 
in the way it looks at the world. A generation that thinks 
the earth is the centre of the universe differs intellectually 
from one that has learned the true position of the earth in 
the solar system, and the general relations of the solar system 
to other similar systems that make up the universe. A genera- 

X [13] 



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tion that sees in every species of animal and plant evidence of 
a special creative act differs from one that has recognized the 
general truth of the conception of evolution. And so in every 
department of knowledge, the great generahzations that have 
been reached through the persistent efforts of scientific investi- 
gators are the intellectual gains that have resulted. These 
great generalizations measure the intellectual wealth of man- 
kind. They arc the foundations of all profitable thought. 
While the generalizations of science belong to the world, not 
all the world takes advantage of its opportunities. Nation 
differs from nation intellectually, as individual differs from 
individual. It is not, however, the possession of knowledge 
that makes the efficient individual and the efficient nation. 
It is well known that an individual may be very learned and 
at the same time very inefficient. The question is, what use 
does he make of his knowledge? When we speak of intel- 
lectual results of scientific investigation, we mean not only 
accumulated knowledge, but the way in which this knowl- 
edge is invested. A man who simply accumulates money, 
and does not see to it that this money is carefully invested, is 
a miser, and no large results can come from his efforts. While, 
then, the intellectual state of a nation is measured partly by 
the extent to which it has taken possession of the generahza- 
tions that belong to the world, it is also measured by the ex- 
tent to which the methods by which knowledge is accumulated 
have been brought into requisition and have become a part of the 
equipment of the people of that nation. The intellectual prog- 
ress of a nation depends upon the adoption of scientific methods 
in dealing with intellectual problems. The scientific method 
is applicable to all kinds of intellectual problems. We need 
it in every department of activity, I have sometimes wondered 
what the result would be if the scientific method could be 
employed in all the manifold problems connected with the 
management of a government. Questions of tariff, of finance, 
of international relations would be dealt with much more 
satisfactorily than at present if the spirit of the scientific method 
were breathed into those who are called upon to deal with 
these questions. It is plain, I think, that the higher the in- 
X [14] 



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tcllcctual state of a nation the better will it deal with all the 
problems that present themselves. As the intellectual state 
is a direct result of scientific investigation, it is clear that the 
nation that adopts the scientific method will in the end out- 
rank both intellectually and industrially the nation that does 
not. 

What are the ethical results of scientific investigation? 
No one can tell. There is one thought that in this connection 
I should like to impress upon you. The fundamental char- 
acteristic of the scientific method is honesty. In dealing 
with any question science asks no favors. The sole object 
is to learn the truth, and to be guided by tlie truth. Absolute 
accuracy, absolute fidelity, absolute honesty are the prime 
conditions of scientific progress. I believe that the constant 
use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress 
upon him who uses it. The results will not be satisfactory 
in all cases, but the tendency will be in the right direction. 
A life spent in accordance with scientific teachings would be 
of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings 
of the highest types of religion. The motives would be dif- 
ferent, but so far as conduct is concerned the results would 
be practically identical. I need not enlarge upon this subject. 
Unfortunately, abstract truth and knowledge of facts and of 
the conclusions to be drawn from them do not at present 
furnish a sufficient basis for right living in the case of the great 
majority of mankind, and science cannot now, and I do not 
believe it ever can, take the place of religion in some form. 
When the feeling that the two are antagonistic w^ars away, 
as it is wearing away, it will no doubt be seen that one supple- 
ments the other, in so far as they have to do with the conduct 
of man. 

What are we doing in this country to encourage scientific 
investigation? Not until about a quarter of a century ago 
can it be said that it met with any encouragement. Since 
then there has been a great change. Up to that time research 
was sporadic. Soon after, it became almost epidemic. The 
direct cause of the change was the establishing of courses in 
our universities for the training of investigators somewhat 
X [15] 



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upon the lines followed in the German universities. In these 
courses the carrying out of an investigation plays an important 
part. This is, in fact, the culmination of the course. At 
first there were not many following these courses, but it was 
not long before there was a demand for the products. Those 
who could present evidence that they had followed such courses 
were generally given the preference. This was especially true 
in the case of appointments in the colleges, some colleges even 
going so far as to decline to appoint any one who had not taken 
the degree of doctor of philosophy, which is the badge of the 
course that involves investigation. As the demand for those 
who had received this training increased, the number of those 
seeking it increased at least in the same proportion. New 
universities were established and old ones caught the spirit 
of the new movement, until from one end of the country to 
the other centres of scientific activity are now found, and the 
amount of research work that is done is enormous compared 
with what was done twenty-five or thirty years ago. Many 
of those who get a taste of the work of investigation become 
fascinated by it and are anxious to devote their lives to it. 
At present, with the facilities for such work available, it seems 
probable that most of those who have a strong desire and 
the necessary industry and ability to follow it find their op- 
portunity somewhere. There is little danger of our losing 
a genius or even one with fair talent. The world is on the look- 
out for them. The demand for those who can do good re- 
search work is greater than the supply. To be sure the ma- 
terial rewards are not as a rule so great as those that are likely 
to be won by the ablest members of some other professions 
and occupations, and as long as this condition of affairs con- 
tinues to exist there will not be so many men of the highest 
intellectual order engaged in this work as we should like to 
see. On the other hand, when we consider the great prog- 
ress that has been made during the last twenty-five years 
or so, we have every reason to take a cheerful view of the 
future. If as much progress should be made in the next 
quarter century, we shall, to say the least, be able to com- 
pete with the foremost nations of the world in scientific in- 
X [i6] 



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vestigation. In my opinion this progress is largely depen- 
dent upon the development of our universities. Without 
the opportunities for training in the methods of scientific in- 
vestigation there will be but few investigators. It is neces- 
sary to have a large number in order that the principle of 
selection may operate. In this line of work, as in others, 
many are called, but few are chosen. 

Another fact that is working advantageously to increase 
the amount of scientific research done in this country is the 
support given by the government in its different scientific 
bureaus. The Geological Survey, the Department of Agri- 
culture, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the National Bureau 
of Standards, and other departments are carrying on a large 
amount of excellent scientific work, and thus helping most 
efficiently to spread the scientific spirit throughout the land. 

Finally, two exceedingly interesting experiments in the 
way of encouraging scientific investigation are now attracting 
the attention of the world. I mean, of course, the Carnegie 
Institution, with its endowment of $10,000,000, and the Rocke- 
feller Institute, devoted to investigations in the field of medi- 
cine, which will no doubt be adequately endowed. It is too 
early to express an opinion in regard to the influence of these 
great foundations upon the progress of scientific investiga- 
tion. As both will make possible the carrying out of many 
investigations that would otherwise probably not be carried 
out, the chances of receivirig valuable results will be increased. 
The danger is that those who are responsible for the manage- 
ment of the funds will be disappointed that the results are not 
at once of a striking character, and that they will be tempted 
to change the method of applying the money before those 
who are using it have had a fair chance. But we who are 
on the outside know little of the plans of those who are inside. 
All signs indicate that they are making an earnest effort to 
solve an exceedingly difficult problem, and all who have the 
opportunity should do everything in their power to aid them. 



X |ii7] 



XI 



OUR COUNTRY 

"THE MAKING OF THE NATION" 

BY 

WOODROW WILSON 

PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



T/f/^ E, have traced humanity hack to its vague sources, we 
have invoked the aid of the chief leaders of present- 
day science to tell us not only what they are achieving now, hut 
what they helieve as to the development of the primal instincts 
of the race. We have endeavored to look upon ourselves as 
science looks upon us, calmly, analytically, comprehensively. 
Let us escape for a moment from this unemotional atmosphere, 
let us turn from consideration of the race, the animal, as a mass, 
and begin the more direct and human study of the individual. 
And first, for man in general we will substitute American man. 
Through what special process has he, the woodsman, the pioneer, 
the colonizer of three centuries ago, become the intellectual, wide- 
reaching, business-like worker of to-day? What changing in- 
fluences have worked upon his mind and body, upon his sur- 
roundings and his government? What, in short, has built up 
''our country'^? 

To guide us here we seek the aid of our foremost contem- 
porary historian, Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton 
since 1902, and author of the noteworthy '^History of the Ameri- 
can People.''^ The following article was originally published 
in the Atlantic Monthly, and is here reprinted by permission 
of the editors and with the approval of President Wilson. The 
broad patriotism of the author saves from all sectional spirit an 
analysis which might easily have become partisan. There is 
weakness in our government, of the occasional evil results of 
XI [I] 



OUR COUNTRY 

which we have all been painjully aware. Dr. Wilsori's keen 
thought points out its source. 

The making of our own nation seems to have taken place 
under our very eyes, so recent and so familiar is the story. 
The great process was worked out in the plain and open day 
of the modern world, statesmen and historians standing by » 
to superintend, criticise, make record of what was done. The 
stirring narrative runs quickly into the day in which we live; 
we can say that our grandfathers builded the government 
which now holds so large a place in the world ; the story seems 
of yesterday, and yet seems entire, as if the making of the 
republic had hastened to complete itself within a single hundred 
years. We are elated to see so great a thing done upon so 
great a scale, and to feel ourselves in so intimate a way actors 
in the moving scene. 

Yet we should deceive ourselves were we to suppose the 
work done, the nation made. We have been told by a cer- 
tain group of our historians that a nation was made when the 
federal Constitution was adopted; that the strong sentences 
of the law sufficed to transform us from a league of States 
into a people single and inseparable. Some tell us, however, 
that it was not till the war of 1812 that we grew fully con- 
scious of a single purpose and destiny, and began to form 
policies as if for a nation. Others see the process com^plete 
only when the civil war struck slavery away, and gave North 
and South a common way of life that should make common 
ideals and common endeavors at last possible. Then, when 
all have had their say, there comes a great movement hke 
the one which we call Populism, to remind us how the country 
still lies apart in sections: some at one stage of development, 
some at another ; some with one hope and purpose for America, 
some with another. And we ask ourselves, Is the history of 
our making as a nation indeed over, or do we still wait upon 
the forces that shall at last unite us? Are we even now, in 
fact, a nation? 

Clearly, it is not a question of sentiment, but a question 
of fact. If it be true that the country, taken as a whole, is at 
XI [2] 



OUR COUNTRY 

one and the same time in several stages of development — not 
a great commercial and manufacturing nation, with here and 
there its broad pastures and the quiet farms from which it 
draws its food; not a vast agricultural community, with here 
and there its ports of shipment and its necessary marts of ex- 
change; nor yet a country of mines, merely, pouring their 
products forth into the markets of the world, to take thence 
whatever it may need for its comfort and convenience in Hving 
— we still wait for its economic and spiritual union. It is many 
things at once. Sections big enough for kingdoms hve by 
agriculture, and farm the wide stretches of a new land by the 
aid of money borrowed from other sections which seem almost 
like another nation, with their teeming cities, dark with the 
smoke of factories, quick with the movements of trade, as 
sensitive to the variations of exchange on London as to the 
variations in the crops raised by their distant fellow-country- 
men on the plains within the continent. Upon other great 
spaces of the vast continent, communities, millions strong, 
live the distinctive Hfe of the miner, have all their fortune 
bound up and centred in a single group of industries, feel in 
their utmost concentration the power of economic forces else- 
where dispersed, and chafe under the unequal yoke that unites 
them with communities so unlike themselves as those which 
lend and trade and manufacture, and those which follow the 
plough and reap the grain that is to feed the world. 

Such contrasts are nothing new in our history, and our 
system of government is admirably adapted to reUeve the 
strain and soften the antagonism they might entail. All our 
national history through our country has lain apart in sec- 
tions, each marking a stage of settlement, a stage of wealth, 
a stage of development, as population has advanced, as if by 
successive journeyings and encampments, from east to west; 
and always new regions have been suffered to become new 
States, form their own life under their own law, plan their 
own economy, adjust their own domestic relations, and legal- 
ize their own methods of business. States have, indeed, 
often been whimsically enough formed. We have left the 
matter of boundaries to surveyors rather than to sta.tesmen, 
XI [3] 



OU^ COUNTRY 

and have by no means managed to construct economic units 
in the making of States. We have joined mining communi- 
ties with agricultural, the mountain with the plain, the ranch 
with the farm, and have left the making of uniform rules to 
the sagacity and practical habit of neighbors ill at ease with 
one another. But on the whole, the scheme, though a bit 
haphazard, has worked itself out with singularly little fric- 
tion and no disaster, and the strains of the great structure 
we have erected have been greatly eased and dissipated. 

Elastic as the system is, however, it stiffens at every point 
of national policy. The federal government can make but 
one rule, and that a rule for the whole country, in each act of 
its legislation. Its very constitution withholds it from dis- 
crimination as between State and State, section and section; 
and yet its chief powers touch just those subjects of economic 
interest in which the several sections of the country feel them- 
selves most unhke. Currency questions do not affect them 
equally or in the same way. Some need an elastic currency 
to serve their uses; others can fill their coffers more readily 
with a currency that is inelastic. Some can build up manu- 
factures under a tariff law; others cannot, and must submit 
to pay more without earning more. Some have one interest 
in a principle of interstate commerce; others, another. It 
would be difficult to find even a question of foreign policy 
which would touch all parts of the country alike. A foreign 
fleet would mean much more to the merchants of Boston and 
New York than to the merchants of Illinois and the farmers 
of the Dakotas. 

The conviction is becoming painfully distinct among us, 
moreover, that these contrasts of conditions and differences 
of interest between the several sections of the country are now 
more marked and emphasized than they ever were before. 
The country has been transformed w^ithin a generation, not 
by any creations in a new kind, but by stupendous changes 
in degree. Every interest has increased its scale and its in- 
dividual significance. The "East" is transformed by the 
vast accumulations of wealth made since the civil war — trans- 
formed from a simple to a complex civiHzation, more like the 
XI [4] 



OUR COUNTRY 

Old World than like the New. The "West" has so magni- 
fied its characteristics by sheer growth, every economic in- 
terest which its life represents has become so gigantic in its 
proportions, that it seems to Eastern men, and to its own 
people also, more than ever a region apart. It is true that the 
"West" is not, as a matter of fact, a region at all, but, in 
Professor Turner's admirable phrase, a stage of development, 
nowhere set apart and isolated, but spread abroad through 
all the far interior of the continent. But it is now a stage of 
development with a difference, as Professor Turner has shown, ^ 
which makes it practically a new thing in our history. The 
"West" was once a series of States and settlements beyond 
which lay free lands not yet occupied, into which the restless 
and all who could not thrive by mere steady industry, all who 
had come too late and all who had stayed too long, could pass 
on, and, it might be, better their fortunes. Now it lies with- 
out outlet. The free lands are gone. New communities 
must make their life sufficient without this easy escape — 
must study economy, find their fortunes in what lies at hand, 
intensify effort, increase capital, build up a future out of de- 
tails. It is as if they were caught in a fixed order of hfe and 
forced into a new competition, and both their self-conscious- 
ness and their keenness to observe every point of self-interest 
are enlarged beyond former example. ' 

That there are currents of national hfe, both strong and 
definite, running in full tide through all the continent from 
sea to sea, no observant person can fail to perceive — currents 
which have long been gathering force, and which cannot now 
be withstood. There need be no fear in any sane man's mind 
that we shall ever again see our national government threatened 
with overthrow by any power which our own growth has bred. 
The temporary danger is that, not being of a common mind, 
because not living under common conditions, the several sec- 
tions of the country, which a various economic development 
has for the time being set apart and contrasted, may struggle 
for supremacy in the control of the government, and that 
we may learn by some sad experience that there is not even 
^ See American Historical Review, Vol. I., p. 71. 

XI [5] 



OUR COUNTRY 

yet any common standard, cither of opinion or of policy, 
underlying our national life. The country is of one mind in 
its allegiance to the government and in its attachment to the 
national idea; but it is not yet of one mind in respect of that 
fundamental question, What policies will best serve us in 
giving strength and development to our hfe? Not the least 
notev^'orthy of the incidents that preceded and foretokened 
the civil war was, if I may so call it, the sectionalization of 
the national idea. Southern merchants bestirred themselves 
to get conventions together for the discussion, not of the issues 
of polities, but of the economic interests of the country. Their 
thought and hope were of the nation. They spoke no word 
of antagonism against any section or interest. Yet it was 
plain in every resolution they uttered that for them the nation 
was one thing and centred in the South, while for the rest of 
the country the nation was another thing and lay in the North 
and Northwest. They were arguing the needs of the nation 
from the needs of their own section. The samiC thing had hap- 
pened in the days of the embargo and the war of 1812. The 
Hartford Convention thought of New England when it spoke 
of the country. So must it ever be when section differs from 
section in the very basis and method of its Hfe. The nation is 
to-day one thing in Kansas, and quite another in Massachusetts. 
^ There is no longer any danger of a civil war. There was 
war between the South and the rest of the nation because 
their differences were removable in no other way. There 
was no prospect that slavery, the root of these differences, 
would ever disappear in the mere process of grow^th. It was 
to be apprehended, on the contrary, that the very processes 
of growth would inevitably lead to the extension of slavery 
and the perpetuation of radical social and economic contrasts 
and antagonisms between State and State, between region 
and region. A heroic remedy was the only remedy. Slavery 
being removed, the South is now joined with the "West," 
joined with it in a stage of development, as a region chiefly 
agricultural, without diversified industries, without a multi- 
farious trade, without those subtle extended nerves which 
come with all-around economic development, and which make 
XI [6] 



k 



OUR COUNTRY 

men keenly sensible of the interests that link the world to- 
gether, as it were into a single community. But these are 
lines of difference which will be effaced by mere growth, which 
time will calmly ignore. They make no boundaries for armies 
to cross. Tide-water Virginia was thus separated once from 
her own population within the Alleghany valleys — held two 
jealous sections within her own limits. Massachusetts once 
knew the sharp divergences of interest and design which 
separated the coast settlements upon the Bay from the rest- 
less pioneers who had taken up the free lands of her own 
western counties. North Carolina was once a comfortable 
and indifferent "East" to the uneasy "West" that was to 
become Tennessee. Virginia once seemed old and effete to 
Kentucky. The "great West" once lay upon the Ohio, but 
has since disappeared there, overlaid by the changes which 
have carried the conditions of the "East" to the Great Lakes 
and beyond. There has never yet been a time in our history 
when we were without an "East" and a "West," but the 
novel day when we shall be without them is now in sight. 
As the country grows it will inevitably grow homogeneous. 
Population will not henceforth spread, but compact; for 
there is no new land between the seas where the "West" can 
find another lodgment. The conditions which prevail in the 
ever- widening "East" will sooner or later cover the continent, 
and we shall at last be one people. The process will not be 
a short one. It will doubtless run through many genera- 
tions and involve many a critical question of statesmanship. 
But it cannot be stayed, and its working out will bring the nation 
to its final character and role in the world. 

In the mean time, shall we not constantly recall our re- 
assuring past, reminding one another again and again, as 
our memories fail us, of the significant incidents of the long 
journey we have already come, in order that we may be cheered 
and guided upon the road we have yet to choose and follow? 
It is only by thus attempting, and attempting again and again, 
some sufficient analysis of our past experiences, that we can 
form any adequate image of our life as a nation, or acquire 
any intelhgent purpose to guide us amidst the rushing move- 
XI [71 



OU^COUNTRY 

ment of affairs. It is no doubt in part by reviewing our lives 
that we shape and determine them. The future will not, in- 
deed, be like the past; of that we may rest assured. It can- 
not be like it in detail; it cannot even resemble it in the large. 
It is one thing to fill a fertile continent with a vigorous people 
and take possession of its treasures; it is quite another to 
complete the work of occupation and civilization in detail. 
Big plans, thought out only in the rough, will suffice for the 
one, but not for the other. A provident leadership, a patient 
tolerance of temporary but unavoidable evils, a just temper 
of compromise and accommodation, a hopeful industry in 
the face of small returns, mutual understandings, and a cordial 
\ spirit of cooperation are needed for the slow, intensive task, 
which were not demanded amidst the free advances of an 
unhampered people from settlement to settlement. And yet 
the past has made the present, and will make the future. It 
has made us a nation, despite a variety of life that threatened 
to keep us at odds among ourselves. It has shown us the 
processes by which differences have been obliterated and 
antagonisms softened. It has taught us how to become strong, 
and will teach us, if we heed its moral, how to become wise, 
also, and single-minded. 

The colonies which formed the Union were brought to- 
gether, let us first remind ourselves, not merely because they 
were neighbors and kinsmen, but because they were forced 
to see that they had common interests which they could serve 
in no other way. "There is nothing which binds one country 
or one State to another but interest," said Washington. "With- 
out this cement the Western inhabitants can have no pre- 
dilection for us." Without that cement the colonies could 
have had no predilection for one another. But it is one thing 
to have common interests, and quite another to perceive them 
and to act upon them. The colonies were first thrust to- 
gether by the pressure of external danger. They needed 
one another, as well as aid from over-sea, as any fool could 
perceive, if they were going to keep their frontiers against 
the Indians, and their outlets upon the Western waters from 
the French. The French and Indian war over, that press- 
XI [8] 



OUR COUNTRY 

ure was relieved, and they might have fallen again apart, 
indifferent to any common aim, unconscious of any common 
interest, had not the government that was their common 
master set itself to make them wince under common wrongs. 
Then it was that they saw how like they were in polity and Hfe 
and interest in the great field of politics, studied their common 
liberty, and became aware of their common ambitions. It 
was then that they became aware, too, that their common 
ambitions could be realized only by union; not single-handed, 
but united against a common enemy. Had they been let 
alone, it would have taken many a long generation of slowly 
increased acquaintance with one another to apprise them of 
their kinship in life and interests and institutions; but Eng- 
land drove them into immediate sympathy and combination, 
unwittingly founding a nation by suggestion. 

The war for freedom over, the new-fledged States entered 
at once upon a very practical course of education which thrust 
its lessons upon them without regard to taste or predilection. 
The Articles of Confederation had been formulated and pro- 
posed to riie States for their acceptance in 1777, as a legali- 
zation of the arrangements that had grown up under the in- 
formal guidance of the Continental Congress, in order that 
law might confirm and strengthen practice, and because an 
actual continental war commanded a continental organiza- 
tion. But the war was virtually over by the time all the re- 
luctant States had accepted the Articles; and the new govern- 
ment had hardly been put into formal operation before it 
became evident that only the war had made such an arrange- 
ment workable. Not compacts, but the compulsions of a 
common danger, had drawn the States into an irregular co- 
operation, and it was even harder to obtain obedience to the 
definite Articles than it had been to get the requisitions of the 
unchartered Congress heeded while the war lasted. Peace 
had rendered the makeshift common government uninterest- 
ing, and had given each State leave to withdraw from com- 
mon undertakings, and to think once more, as of old, only 
of itself. Their own affairs again isolated and restored to their 
former separate importance, the States could no longer spare 
XI [9] 



OUR.COUNTRY 



'h 



their chief men for what was considered the minor work of 
the general Congress. The best men had been gradually 
withdrawn from Congress before the war ended, and now 
there seemed less reason than ever why they should be sent 
to talk at Philadelphia, when they were needed for the actual 
work of administration at home. PoHtics fell back into their 
old localization, and every pubHc man found his chief tasks 
at home. There were still, as a matter of fact, common needs 
and dangers scarcely less imperative and menacing than 
those which had drawn the colonies together against the mother 
country; but they were needs and perils of peace, and ordi- 
nary men did not see them; only the most thoughtful and 
observant were conscious of them: extraordinary events were 
required to hft them to the general view. 

Happily, there were thoughtful and observant men who 
were already the chief figures of the country — men whose 
leadership the people had long since come to look for and 
accept — and it was through them that the States were 
brought to a new common consciousness, and at last to 
a real union. It was not possible for the several States to 
live self-sufficient and apart, as they had done when they 
were colonies. They had then had a common government, 
little as they hked to submit to it, and their foreign affairs 
had been taken care of. They were now to learn how ill 
they could dispense with a common providence. Instead of 
France, they now had England for neighbor in Canada and 
on the Western waters, where they had themselves but the 
other day fought so hard to set her power up. She was their 
rival and enemy, too, on the seas; refused to come to any 
treaty terms with them in regard to commerce; and laughed 
to see them unable to concert any policy against her because 
they had no common political authority among themselves. 
She had promised, in the treaty of peace, to withdraw her 
garrisons from the Western posts which lay within the terri- 
tory belonging to the Confederation; but Congress had prom- 
ised that British creditors should be paid what was due 
them, only to find that the States would make no laws to ful- 
fil the promise, and were determined to leave their Federal 
XI [ lo ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

representatives without power to make them; and England 
kept her troops where they were. Spain had taken France's 
place upon the farther bank of the Mississippi and at the great 
river's mouth. Grave questions of foreign policy pressed on 
every side, as of old, and no State could settle them unaided 
and for herself alone. 

Here was a group of commonwealths which would have 
Hved separately and for themselves, and could not; which 
had thought to make shift with merely a "league of friend- 
ship" between them and a Congress for consultation, and 
found that it was impossible. There were common debts 
to pay, but there was no common system of taxation by which 
to meet them, nor any authority to devise and enforce such 
a system. There were common enemies and rivals to deal 
with, but no one was authorized to carry out a common poHcy 
against them. There was a common domain to settle and 
administer, but no one knew how a Congress without the 
power to command was to manage so great a property. The 
Ordinance of 1787 was indeed bravely framed, after a method 
of real statesmanship; but there was no warrant for it to be 
found in the Articles, and no one could say how Congress 
would execute a law it had had no authority to enact. It 
was not merely the hopeless confusion and sinister signs of 
anarchy which abounded in their own affairs — a rebellion 
of debtors in Massachusetts, tariff wars among the States 
that lay upon New York Bay and on the Sound, North Caro- 
lina's doubtful supremacy among her settlers in the Ten- 
nessee country, Virginia's questionable authority in Ken- 
tucky — that brought the States at last to attempt a better 
union and set up a real government for the whole country. 
It was the inevitable continental outlook of affairs as well; 
if nothing more, the sheer necessity to grow and touch their 
neighbors at close quarters. 

Washington had been among the first to see the neces- 
sity of living, not by a local, but by a continental pohcy. Of 
course he had a direct pecuniary interest in the development 
of the Western lands — had himself preempted many a broad 
acre lying upon the far Ohio, as well as upon the nearer western 

XI [ II ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

slopes of the mountains — and it is open to any one who likes 
the sinister suggestion to say that his ardor for the occupancy 
of the Western country was that of the land speculator, not 
that of the statesman. Everybody knows that it was a con- 
ference between delegates from Maryland and Virginia about 
Washington's favorite scheme of joining the upper waters of 
the Potomac with the upper waters of the streams which 
made their way to the Mississippi — a conference held at his 
suggestion and at his house — that led to the convening of 
that larger conference at Annapohs, which called for the ap- 
pointment of the body that met at Philadelphia and framed 
the Constitution under which he was to become the first Presi- 
dent of the United States. It is open to any one who chooses 
to recall how keen old Governor Dinwiddle had been, when 
he came to Virginia, to watch these same Western waters in 
the interests of the first Ohio Company, in which he had 
bought stock; how promptly he called the attention of the 
ministers in England to the aggressions of the French in that 
quarter, sent Washington out as his agent to warn the in- 
truders off, and pushed the business from stage to stage, till 
the French and Indian war was ablaze, and nations were in 
deadly conflict on both sides of the sea. It ought to be nothing 
new and nothing strange, to those who have read the history 
of the English race the world over, to learn that conquests 
have a thousand times sprung out of the initiative of men 
who have first followed private interests into new lands like 
speculators, and then planned their occupation and govern- 
ment like statesmen. Dinwiddle was no statesman, but 
Washington was; and the circumstance which it is worth 
while to note about him is, not that he went prospecting upon 
the Ohio when the French war was over, but that he saw 
more than fertile lands there — saw the "seat of a rising em- 
pire," and, first among the men of his day, perceived by what 
means its settlers could be bound to the older communities 
in the East aUke in interest and in polity. Here were the 
first "West" and the first "East," and Washington's thought 
mediating between them. 

I The formation of the Union brought a real government 
XI [12] 



OUR COUNTRY 

into existence, and that government set about its work with 
an energy, a dignity, a thoroughness of plan, which made 
the whole country aware of it from the outset, and aware, 
consequently, of the national scheme of political life it had 
been devised to promote. Hamilton saw to it that the new 
government should have a definite party and body of interests 
at its back. It had been fostered in the making by the com- 
mercial classes at the ports and along the routes of commerce, 
and opposed in the rural districts which lay away from the 
centres of population. Those who knew the forces that 
played from State to State, and made America a partner in 
the life of the world, had earnestly wanted a government that 
should preside and choose in the making of the nation; but 
those who saw only the daily round of the countryside had 
been indifferent or hostile, consulting their pride and their 
prejudices. Hamilton sought a poHcy which should serve 
the men who had set the government up, and found it in the 
funding of the debt, both national and domestic, the assump- 
tion of the Revolutionary obligations of the States, and the 
estabHshment of a national bank. This was what the friends 
of the new plan had wanted, the rehabiHtation of credit, and 
the government set out with a programme meant to commend 
it to men with money and vested interests. 

It was just such a government that the men of an oppo- 
site interest and temperament had dreaded, and Washing- 
ton was not out of office before the issue began to be clearly 
drawn between those who wanted a strong government, with 
a great establishment, a system of finance which should domi- 
nate the markets, an authority in the field of law which should 
restrain the States and make the Union, through its courts, 
the sole and final judge of its own powers, and those who dreaded 
nothing else so much, wished a government which should 
hold the country together with as little thought as possible 
of its own aggrandizement, went all the way with JefTerson 
in his jealousy of the commercial interest, accepted his ideal 
of a dispersed power put into commission among the States 
— even among the local units within the States — and looked 
to see Hberty discredited amidst a display of federal power. 
XI [ 13 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

When the first party had nad their day in the setting up of 
the government and the inauguration of a poHcy which should 
make it authoritative, the party of Jefferson came in to purify 
it. They began by attacking the federal courts, which had 
angered every man of their faith by a steady maintenance 
and elaboration of the federal power; they ended by using 
that power just as their opponents had used it. In the first 
place, it was necessary to buy Louisiana, and with it the con- 
trol of the Mississippi, notwithstanding Mr. Jefferson's solemn 
conviction that such an act was utterly without constitutional 
warrant; in the second place, they had to enforce an arbitrary 
embargo in order to try their hand at reprisal upon foreign 
rivals in trade; in the end, they had to recharter the national 
bank, create a national debt and a sinking fund, impose an 
excise upon whiskey, lay direct taxes, devise a protective 
tariff, use coercion upon those who would not aid them in 
a great war — play the role of masters and tax-gatherers as the 
Federalists had played it— on a greater scale, even, and with 
equal gusto. Everybody knows the familiar story: it has 
new significance from day to day only as it illustrates the in- 
variable process of nation-making which has gone on from 
generation to generation, from the first until now. 

Opposition to the exercise and expansion of the federal 
power only matle it the more inevitable by making it the more 
deliberate. The passionate protests, the plain speech, the 
sinister forecasts, of such men as John Randolph aided the 
process by making it self-conscious. What Randolph meant 
as an accusation, those who chose the policy of the govern- 
ment presently accepted as a prophecy. It was true, as he 
said, that a nation was in the making, and a government 
under which the privileges of the States would count for less 
than the compulsions of the common interest. Few had seen 
it so at first; the men who were old when the government 
was born refused to see it so to the last; but the young men 
and those who came fresh upon the stage from decade to dec- 
ade presently found the scarecrow look hke a thing they 
might love. Their ideal took form with the reiterated sug- 
gestion; thev began to hope for what they had been bidden 
XI [14] 



OUR COUNTRY 

to dread. No party could long use the federal authority 
without coming to feel it national — without forming some 
ideal of the common interest, and of the use of power by which 
it should be fostered. 

When they adopted the tariff of 1816, the Jeffersonians 
themselves formulated a pohcy which should endow the federal 
government with a greater economic power than even Hamil- 
ton had planned w^hcn he sought to win the support of the 
merchants and the lenders of money; and when they bought 
something like a third of the continent beyond the Mississippi, 
they made it certain the nation should grow upon a continental 
scale which no provincial notions about state powers and a 
common government kept within strait bounds could possi- 
bly survive. Here were the two forces which were to domi- 
nate us till the present day, and make the present issues of 
our politics: an open "West" into which a frontier popu- 
lation was to be thrust from generation to generation, and 
a protective tariff which should build up special interests the 
while in the "East," and make the contrast ever sharper and 
sharper between section and section. What the "West" is 
doing now is simply to note more dehberately than ever before, 
and with a keener distaste, this striking contrast between 
her own development and that of the "East." That was 
a true instinct of statesmanship which led Henry Clay to 
couple* a policy of internal improvements with a policy of pro- 
tection. Internal improvements meant in that day great *^ 
roads leading into the West, and every means taken to open 
the country to use and settlement. While a protective tariff 
was building up special industries in the East, pubhc works 
should make an outlet into new lands for all who were not 
getting the benefit of the system. The plan worked admira- 
bly for many a day, and was justly called "American," so 
well did it match the circumstances of a set of communities, 
half old, half new: the old waiting to be developed, the new 
setting the easy scale of living. The other side of the policy 
was left for us. There is no longer any outlet for those who 
are not the beneficiaries of the protective system, and nothing 
but the contrasts it has created remains to mark its triumphs. 
XI [15] 



OUR COUNTRY 

Internal improv-cments no longer relieve the strain; they 
have become merely a means of largess. 

The history of the United States has been one continuous 
story of rapid, stupendous growth, and all its great questions 
have been questions of growth. It was proposed in the Con- 
stitutional Convention of 1787 that a limit should be set to 
the number of new members to be admitted to the House 
of Representatives from States formed beyond the Allegha- 
nies; and the suggestion was conceived with a true instinct 
of prophecy. The old States were not only to be shaken 
out of their self-centred Hfe, but were even to see their very 
government changed over their heads by the rise of States 
"in the Western country. John Randolph voted against the 
admission of Ohio into the Union, because he held that no 
new partner should be admitted to the federal arrangement 
except by unanimous consent. It was the very next year 
that Louisiana was purchased, and a million square miles 
were added to the territory out of which new States were to be 
made. Had the original States been able to live to them- 
selves, keeping their own people, elaborating their own life, 
without a common property to manage, unvexed by a vacant 
continent, national questions might have been kept within 
modest limits. They might even have made shift to digest 
Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, and the great 
commonwealths carved out of the Northwest Territory, for 
which the Congress of the Confederation had already made 
provision. But the Louisiana purchase opened the continent 
to the planting of States, and took the processes of nationali- 
zation out of the hands of the original "partners." Ques- 
tions of politics were henceforth to be questions of growth. 
For a while the question of slavery dominated all the rest. 
The Northwest Territory was closed to slavery by the Ordi- 
nance of 1787. Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Alabama, 
took slavery almost without question from the States from 
which they were sprung. But Missouri gave the whole country 
view of the matter which must be settled in the making of 
every State founded beyond the Mississippi. The slavery 
struggle, which seems to us who are near it to occupy so great 
a space in the field of our affairs, was, of course, a struggle 
XI [ 16 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

for and against the extension of slavery, not for or against 
its existence in the States where it had taken root from of 
old — a question of growth, not of law. It will some day be 
seen to have been, for all it was so stupendous, a mere epi- 
sode of development. Its result was to remove a ground of 
economic and social difference as between section and sec- 
tion which threatened to become permanent, standing forever 
in the way of a homogeneous life. The passionate struggle to 
prevent its extension inevitably led to its total abolition; 
and the way was clear for the South, as well as the "West," to 
become Hke its neighbor sections in every element of its hfe. 

It had also a further, almost incalculable effect in its stimu- 
lation of a national sentiment. It created throughout the 
North and Northwest a passion of devotion to the Union 
which really gave the Union a new character. The nation 
was fused into a single body in the fervent heat of the time. 
At the beginning of the war the South had seemed hke a sec- 
tion pitted against a section; at its close it seemed a territory 
conquered by a neighbor nation. That nation is now, take 
it roughly, that "East" which we contrast with the "West" 
of our day. The economic conditions once centred at New 
York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburg, and the 
other commercial and industrial cities of the coast States are 
now to be found, hardly less clearly marked, in Chicago, in 
Minneapohs, in Detroit, through all the great States that lie 
upon the Lakes, in all the old "Northwest." The South 
has fallen into a new economic classification. In respect 
of its stage of development it belongs with the "West," though 
in sentiment, in traditional ways of life, in many a point of 
practice and detail, it keeps its old individuality, and though 
it has in its peculiar labor problem a hinderance to progress 
at once unique and ominous. 

It is to this point we have come in the making of the nation. 
The old sort of growth is at an end — the growth by mere ex- 
pansion. We have now to look more closely to internal con- 
ditions, and study the means by which a various people is 
to be bound together in a single interest. Many differences 
will pass away of themselves. "East" and "West" will come 
together by a slow approach, as capital accumulates where 
XI [17] 



OUR COUNTRY 

now it is only borrowed, as industrial development makes 
its way westward in a new variety, as life gets its linal elabora- 
tion and detail throughout all the great spaces of the con- 
tinent, until all the scattered parts of the nation are drawn 
into real community of interest. Even the race problem of 
the South will no doubt work itself out in the slowness of 
time, as blacks and whites pass from generation to genera- 
tion, gaining with each removal from the memories of the war 
a surer self-possession, an easier view of the division of labor 
and of social function to be arranged between them. Time 
is the only legislator in such a matter. But not everything 
can be left to drift and slow accommodation. The nation 
which has grown to the proportions almost of the continent 
within the century, Ues under our eyes, unfinished, unhar- 
monized, waiting still to have its parts adjusted, lacking its 
last lesson in the ways of peace and concert. It required 
statesmanship of no mean sort to bring us to our present 
growth and lusty strength. It will require leadership of a 
much higher order to teach us the triumphs of cooperation, 
the self-possession and calm choices of maturity. 

Much may be brought about by a mere knowledge of the 
situation. It is not simply the existence of facts that governs 
us, but consciousness and comprehension of the facts. The 
whole process of statesmanship consists in bringing facts to 
light, and shaping law to suit, or, if need be, mould them. 
It is part of our present danger that men of the "East" listen 
only to their own public men, men of the "West" only to 
theirs. We speak of the "West" as out of sympathy with 
the "East": it would be instructive once and again to reverse 
the terms, and admit that the "East" neither understands 
nor sympathizes with the "West"— and thorough nationah- 
zation depends upon mutual understandings and sympathies. 
There is an unpleasant significance in the fact that the "East" 
has made no serious attempt to understand the desire for 
the free coinage of silver in the "West" and the South. If 
it were once really probed and comprehended, we should 
know that it is necessary to reform our currency at once, and 
we should know in what way it is necessary to reform it ; we 
should know that a new protective tariff only marks with a 
XI [ i8 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

new emphasis the contrast in economic interest between the 
"East" and the "West," and that nothing but currency re- 
form can touch the cause of the present discontents. 

Ignorance and indifference as between section and sec- 
tion no man need wonder at who knows the habitual courses 
of history; and no one who comprehends the essential sound- 
ness of our people's life can mistrust the future of the nation. 
He may confidently expect a safe nationalization of in- 
terest and policy in the end, whatever folly of experiment 
and fitful change he may fear in the mean while. He can 
only wonder that we should continue to leave ourselves so 
utterly without adequate means of formulating a national 
policy. Certainly Providence has presided over our affairs 
with a strange indulgence, if it is true that Providence helps 
only those who first seek to help themselves. The making 
of a nation has never been a thing deliberately planned and 
consummated by the counsel and authority of leaders, but 
the daily conduct and policy of a nation which has won its 
place must be so planned. So far we have had the hope- 
fulness, the readiness, and the hardihood of youth in these 
matters, and have never become fully conscious of the posi- 
tion into which our peculiar frame of government has brought 
us. We have waited a whole century to observe that we 
have made no provision for authoritative national leader- 
ship in matters of policy. The President does not always 
speak with authority, because he is not always a man picked 
out and tested by any processes in which the people have 
been participants, and has nothing often but his ofiice to 
render him influential. Even when the country does know 
and trust him, he can carry his views no further than to 
recommend them to the attention of Congress in a written 
message which the Houses would deem themselves subservient 
to give too much heed to. Within the Houses there is no 
man, except the Vice-President, to whose choice the whole 
country gives heed; and he is chosen, not to be a Senator, 
but only to wait upon the disability of the President, and 
preside meanwhile over a body of which he is not a member. 
The House of Representatives has in these latter days made 
its Speaker its political leader as well as its parliamentary 
XI [19] 



OUlpCOUNTRY 



moderator; but the country is, of course, never consulted 
about that beforehand, and his leadership is not the open 
leadership of discussion, but the undebatable leadership of 
the parliamentary autocrat. 

This singular leaderless structure of our government never 
stood fully revealed until the present generation, and even 
now awaits general recognition. PecuHar circumstances and 
the practical political habit and sagacity of our people for 
long concealed it. The framers of the Constitution no doubt 
expected the President and his advisers to exercise a real 
leadership in affairs, and for more than a generation after 
the setting up of the government their expectation was ful- 
filled. Washington was accepted as leader no less by Con- 
gress than by the people. Hamilton, from the Treasury, 
really gave the government both its policy and its adminis- 
trative structure. If John Adams had less authority than 
Washington, it was because the party he represented was losing 
its hold upon the country. Jefferson was the most consum- 
mate party chief, the most unchecked master of legislative 
poHcy, we have had in America, and his dynasty was continued 
in Madison and Monroe. But Madison's terms saw Clay 
and Calhoun come to the front in the House, and many another 
man of the new generation, ready to guide and coach the Presi- 
dent rather than to be absolutely controlled by him. Mon- 
roe was not of the calibre of his predecessors, and no party 
could rally about so stiff a man, so cool a partisan, as John 
Quincy Adams. And so the old poHtical function of the presi- 
dency came to an end, and it was left for Jackson to give it 
a new one — instead of a leadership of counsel, a leadership 
and discipline by rewards and punishments. Then the slavery 
issue began to dominate politics, and a long season of con- 
centrated passion brought individual men of force into power 
in Congress — natural leaders of men like Clay, trained and 
eloquent advocates like Webster, keen debaters with a logic 
whose thrusts were as sharp as those of cold steel Hke Cal- 
houn. The war made the Executive of necessity the nation's 
leader again, with the great Lincoln at its head, who seemed 
to embody, with a touch of genius, the very character of the 
race itself. Then reconstruction came — under whose leader- 
XI [ 20 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

ship who could say? — and we were left to wonder what, hence- 
forth, in the days of ordinary peace and industry, we were to 
make of a government which could in humdrum times yield 
us no leadership at all. The tasks which confront us now 
are not like those which centred in the war, in which passion 
made men run together to a common work. Heaven forbid 
that we should admit any element of passion into the dehcate 
matters in which national poHcy must mediate between the dif- 
fering economic interests of sections which a wise moderation 
will assuredly unite in the ways of harmony and peace ! We 
shall need, not the mere compromises of Clay, but a construct- 
ive leadership of which Clay hardly showed himself capable. 
There are few things more disconcerting to the thought, 
in any effort to forecast the future of our affairs, than the fact 
that we must continue to take our executive policy from presi- 
dents given us by nominating conventions, and our legislation 
from conference committees of the House and Senate. Evi- 
dently it is a purely providential form of government. We 
should never have had Lincoln for President had not the Re- 
pubHcan convention of i860 sat in Chicago, and felt the weight 
of the galleries in its work — and one does not like to think 
what might have happened had Mr. Seward been nominated. 
We might have had Mr. Bryan for President, because of the 
impression which may be made upon an excited assembly by 
a good voice and a few ringing sentences flung forth just after 
a cold man who gave unpalatable counsel had sat down. The 
country knew absolutely nothing about Mr. Bryan before his 
nomination, and it would not have known anything about 
him afterward had he not chosen to make speeches. It was 
not Mr. McKinley, but Mr. Reed, who was the real leader 
of the RepubHcan party. It has become a commonplace 
among us that conventions prefer dark horses — prefer those 
who are not tested leaders with well-known records, to those 
who are. It has become a commonplace among all nations 
which have tried popular institutions, that the actions of such 
bodies as our nominating conventions are subject to the play 
of passion and of chance. They meet to do a single thing — 
for the platform is really left to a committee — and upon that 
one thing all intrigue centres. Who that has witnessed them 
XI [21] 



f 

OUR COUNTRY 

will ever forget the intense night scenes, the feverish recesses, 
of our nominating conventions, when there is a running to and 
fro of agents from delegation to delegation, and every can- 
didate has his busy headquarters — can ever forget the shout- 
ing and almost frenzied masses on the floor of the hall when 
the convention is in session, swept this way and that by every 
wind of sudden feeling, impatient of debate, incapable of de- 
hberation? When a convention's brief work is over, its own 
members can scarcely remember the plan and order of it. 
They go home unmarked, and sink into the general body of 
those who have nothing to do with the conduct of government. 
They cannot be held responsible if their candidate fails in 
his attempt to carry on the Executive. 

It has not often happened that candidates for the presi- 
dency have been chosen from outside the ranks of those who 
have seen service in national pohtics. Congress is apt to be 
peculiarly sensitive to the exercise of executive authority by 
men who have not at some time been members of the one House 
or the other, and so learned to sympathize with members' 
views as to the relations that ought to exist between the Presi- 
dent and the federal legislature. No doubt a good deal of 
the dislike which the Houses early conceived for Mr. Cleve- 
land was due to the feeling that he was an "outsider," a man 
without congressional sympathies and points of view — a sort 
of irregular and amateur at the delicate game of national 
politics as played at Washington; most of the men whom he 
chose as advisers were of the same kind, without Washing- 
ton credentials. Mr. McKinley, though of the congressional 
circle himself, repeated the experiment in respect of his cabi- 
net in the appointment of such men as Mr. Gage and Mr. 
Bliss and Mr. Gary. Members resent such appointments; 
they seem to drive the two branches of the government further 
apart than ever, and yet they grow more common from ad- 
ministration to administration. 

These appointments make cooperation between Congress 
and the Executive more difticult, not because the men thus 
appointed lack respect for the Houses or seek to gain any 
advantage over them, but because they do not know how to 
deal with them — through what persons and by what cour- 
XI [ 22 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

tesies of approach. To the uninitiated Congress is simply 
a mass of individuals. It has no responsible leaders known 
to the system of government, and the leaders recognized by 
its rules arc one set of individuals for one sort of legislation, 
another for another. The Secretaries cannot address or ap- 
proach either House as a whole; in dealing with committees 
they are deaUng only with groups of individuals; neither party 
has its leader — there are only influential men here and there 
who know how to manage its caucuses and take advantage 
of parliamentary openings on the floor. There is a master 
in the House, as every member very well knows, and even 
the easy-going pubHc are beginning to observe. The Speaker 
appoints the committees; the committees practically frame 
all legislation; the Speaker, accordingly, gives or withholds 
legislative power and opportunity, and members are granted 
influence or deprived of it much as he pleases. He of course 
administers the rules, and the rules are framed to prevent 
debate and individual initiative. He can refuse recognition 
for the introduction of measures he disapproves of as party 
chief; he may make way for those he desires to see passed. 
He is chairman of the Committee on Rules, by which the 
House submits to be governed (for fear of helplessness and 
chaos) in the arrangement of its business and the apportion- 
ment of its time. In brief, he is not only its moderator, but 
its master. New members protest and write to the news- 
papers; but old members submit — and indeed the Speaker's 
power is inevitable. You must have leaders in a numerous 
body — leaders with authority; and you cannot give authority 
in the House except through the rules. The man who ad- 
ministers the rules must be master, and you must put this 
mastery into the hands of your best party leader. The legis- 
lature being separated from the executive branch of the gov- 
ernment, the only rewards and punishments by which you 
can secure party discipHne are those within the gift of the 
rules — the committee appointments and preferences: you can- 
not administer these by election; party government would 
break down in the midst of personal exchanges of electoral 
favors. Here again you must trust the Speaker to organize 
and choose, and your only party leader is your moderator. 
XI [ 23 ] 



OUR COUNTRY 

He does not lead by debate; he explains, he proposes nothing 
to the country; you learn his will in his ruhngs. 

It is with such machinery that we are to face the future, 
find a wise and moderate poHcy, bring the nation to a com- 
mon, a cordial understanding, a real unity of life. The Presi- 
dent can lead only as he can command the ear of both Con- 
gress and the country — only as any other individual might 
who could secure a Hke general hearing and acquiescence. 
PoHcy must come always from the deliberations of the House 
committees, the debates, both secret and open, of the Senate, 
the compromises of committee conference between the Houses; 
no one man, no group of men, leading; no man, no group 
of men, responsible for the outcome. Unquestionably we 
behevc in a guardian destiny! No other race could have ac- 
complished so much with such a system; no other race would 
have dared risk such an experiment. We shall work out a 
remedy, for work it out we must. We must find or make, 
somewhere in our system, a group of men to lead us, who rep- 
resent the nation in the origin and responsibiHty of their power; 
who shall draw the Executive, which makes choice of foreign 
policy and upon whose ability and good faith the honorable 
execution of the laws depends, into cordial cooperation with 
the legislature, which, under whatever form of government, 
must sanction law and pohcy. Only under a national leader- 
ship, by a national selection of leaders, and by a method of con- 
structive choice rather than of compromise and barter, can a 
various nation be peacefully led. Once more is our problem 
of nation-making the problem of a form of government. Shall 
we show the sagacity, the open-mindedness, the moderation, 
in our task of modification, that were shown under Wash- 
ington and Madison and Sherman and FrankHn and Wilson, 
in the task of construction? 



XI [ 24 ] 



XII 



C( 



PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

BY 

HIS EMINENCE CARDINAL GIBBONS 

CHIEF PRELATE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA 



PRESIDENT WILSON has shown us the steps by which 
our country has become the mighty and happy land it is. 
Let us look now to the spirit which has made it great, to the pa- 
triotism which has guided and inspired its advance. Let us, 
moreover, consider this patriotism in no idle mood oj joy, or pride, 
or selj-gratulation. Rather must we study thoughtfully the means 
by which love of country has been roused in the past. We must 
seek the root of the emotions from which so fair a flower blooms; 
we must examine the meaning of this inspiring power which we 
have all seen in action, this undeniable spiritual force. We 
must aim to find why God implanted it in the heart of man. If 
in this search we become convinced of patriotism'' s high worth, 
we must then question what dangers threaten it, what means shall 
be taken to preserve it and to stimulate it to yet greater strength 
of inspiration in the coming years. 

For this search, less simple than perchance it seems, let us 
accept the guidance of that distinguished prelate who stands at 
the head of the Roman Catholic Church in America. However 
widely many of us may differ from Cardinal Gibbons in matters 
of religious faith, yet his pure, strong, simple life has wo7i him 
the respect of all. His steady influence in ^^ Americanizing'^ the 
Catholic Church marks him as a friend of liberty. And his 
ever-widening fame guarantees that any written word of his will 
be filled full with a broad knowledge, a high wisdom, and a prac- 
tical common-sense. 

XII [ I ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

I HAVE no apology to make for offering some reflections on 
the political outlook of the nation; for my rights as a citizen 
were not abdicated or abridged on becoming a Christian prel- 
ate, and the sacred character which I profess, far from lessen- 
ing, rather increases, my obligations to my country. 

In answer to those who affirm that a churchman is not quali- 
fied to discuss poHtics, by reason of his sacred calUng, which 
removes him from the pohtical arena, I would say that this 
statement may be true in the sense that a clergyman as such 
should not be a heated partisan of any political party; but it 
is not true in the sense that he is unfitted by his sacred profes- 
sion for discussing pohtical principles. His very seclusion from 
popular agitation gives him a vantage-ground over those that 
are in the whirlpool of party strife, just as they, who have never 
witnessed Shakespeare's plays performed on the stage, are 
better qualified to judge of the genius of the author and the 
literary merit of his productions than they who witness the 
plays amid the environment of stage scenery. 

It is needless to say that I write not merely as a church- 
man, but as a citizen; not in a partisan, but in a patriotic, 
spirit; not in advocacy of any particular party, but in vindica- 
tion of pure government. There is a moral side to most politi- 
cal questions; and my purpose here is to consider the ethical 
aspect of politics, and the principles of justice by which they 
should be regulated. 

Every man in the Commonwealth leads a dual life — a pri- 
vate Ufe under the shadow of the home, and a pubhc hfe under 
the aegis of the State. lAs a father, a husband, or a son, he 
owes certain duties to the family; as a citizen, he owes certain 
obligations to his country. These civic virtues are all com- 
prised under the generic name, patriotism. ^^ 

Patriotism means love of country! Its root is the Latin 
word patria, a word not domesticated in English. The French 
have it in patrie; the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races have it 
Hterally translated in Fatherland. "Fatherland," says Cicero, 
"is the common parent of us all: Patria est communis omnium 
nostrum parens.'"^ 'It is the parental home extended, the 

^ See Cicero's De Finihus, III., p. 19. 
XII [ 2 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

family reaching out to the city, the province, the country. 
Hence, with us Fatherland and Country have come to be synony- 
mous.'^ Country in this sense comprises two elements, the soil 
itself, and the men who live thereon. We love the soil in which 
our fathers sleep — terra patrum, terra palria, the land in which 
we were born. We love the men who as fellow-dwellers share 
that land with us. When, not long ago, Dom Pedro, the exiled 
Emperor of Brazil, died in Paris, he was laid to his last sleep 
on Brazihan soil, which he had carried away with him for that 
very purpose. ■ Let a citizen from Maine meet a citizen from 
CaUfornia on the shores of the Bosphorus or on the banks of 
the Tiber, they will, at once, forget that at home they dwelt 
three thousand miles apart) State Unes are obhterated, party 
differences are laid aside, rehgious animosities, if such had 
existed, are extinguished. iThey warmly clasp hands, they 
remember only that they are fellow-American citizens, children 
of the same mother, fellow-dwellers in the same land over 
which floats the star-spangled banner?! 

Patriotism implies not only love of soil and of fellow-citi- 
zens, but also, and principally, attachment to the laws, institu- 
tions, and government of one's country; filial admiration of 
the heroes, statesmen, and men of genius, who have contributed 
to its renown by the valor of their arms, the wisdom of their 
counsel, or their literary fame. It includes, also, an ardent 
zeal for the maintenance of those sacred principles that secure 
to the citizen freedom of conscience, and an earnest determi- 
nation to consecrate his Hfe, if necessary, pro arts et jocis (in 
defence of altar and fireside), of God and Fatherland. Pa- 
triotism is a universal sentiment of the race : 

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead 
Who never to himself hath said, 

'Thisismy own, my native land!' " 

A certain philosophical school has taught that love of country 
has its origin in physical comfort. Ihi patria uhi bene. But 
is it not true that one's country becomes dear in proportion to 
the sufferings endured for it ? Have not the sacrifices of our 
wars developed the patriotism of the American? !ln fact, it 
is the most suffering and persecuted races that are endowed 
xn [ 3 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

with the deepest patriotisil^ We may even go so far as to say 
that the rougher the soil, the harsher the cHmate, the greater 
the material privations of a land, the more intense is the love 
of its inhabitants for it. Witness the Irish peasant. And are 
not the Sv^^iss in their narrow valleys and on their steep moun- 
tain-sides, the Scotch on their rugged Highlands the classic 
models of patriotism? Nay, the Eskimo, amid the perpet- 
ual snows that hide from his eyes every green spot of earth, loves 
his home nor dreams of a f airer.N 

Patriotism is not a sentiment born of material and physical 
well-being; it is a sentiment that the poverty of country and 
the discomforts of climate do not diminish, that the inflictions 
of conquest and despotism do not augment. The truth is, it is 
a rational instinct placed by the Creator in the breast of man. 
When God made man a social being. He gave him a sentiment 
that urges him to sacrifice himself for his family and his country, 
which is, as it were, his larger family. "Dear are ancestors, 
dear are children, dear are relatives and friends; all these 
loves are contained in love of country." ^ 

The Roman was singularly devoted to his country. Civis 
Ronianus sum (I am a citizen of Rome) was his proudest boast. 
He justly gloried in being a citizen of a repubHc conspicuous 
for its centuries of endurance, for the valor of its soldiers, for 
the wisdom of its statesmen and the genius of its writers. One 
of its greatest poets has sung: "It is sweet and honorable to 
die for one's country."^ So execrable was the crime of treason 
regarded, that the traitor not only suffered extreme penalties 
in this hfe, but he is consigned after death by Virgil to the most 
gloomy regions of Tartarus. ^ 

Love of country shows itself in the citizen by the observance 
of law and the good use of political rights; and in those that, 
for the time being, govern, by justice and disinterestedness in 
their administration. Ministers of religion manifest their pa- 
triotism, not only as citizens, but also as spiritual teachers and 

^ Cari sunt parentes, cari liberi, propinqui, familiares, sed omnes 
omnium caritates patria una complexa est. (Cicero, De Off., I., 17.) 

2 Dulce et decorum pro patria mori. (Horace, B. III., Ode II.) 

3 See Virgil's /Eneid, Book VI. 

XII [4] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

leaders of the people, by inculcating the religious, moral, and 
civic virtues, and by prayer to the throne of God for the welfare 
of the land. "I desire, therefore," wrote St. Paul to his dis- 
ciple Timothy, "first of all that supplications, prayers, inter- 
cessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men ; for kings and 
for all that are in high station, that we may lead a quiet and 
peaceable Hfe in all piety and chastity; for this is good and 
acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour." ^ 

The Catholic Church in our country is not unmindful of 
this duty. A prayer composed by Archbishop Carroll to beg 
Heaven's blessing on the land and its rulers, a masterpiece of 
liturgical literature, is recited every Sunday at the solemn ser- 
vice in some parts of the United States, and notably in the 
Cathedral at Baltimore, in which the custom has never ceased 
since it was introduced by Baltimore's first Archbishop over one 
hundred years ago. 

To the soldier, patriotism has inspired the most heroic 
deeds of courage and self-sacrifice. The victories of Debora, 
Judith, and Gcdeon, achieved for God and country, are re- 
corded with praise in Sacred Scripture. 

The stand of Leonidas in the pass of Thermopylae with 
his three hundred Spartans against the million Persians of 
Xerxes; the boldness of his answer to the Oriental monarch's 
summons to lay down arms, "Let him come and take them"; 
the recklessness of his reply to the threat that so numerous 
were his foes that the very heavens would be darkened by 
their arrows, "'Tis well. We shall fight in the shade"; the 
fierce battle; the fall of almost all the Grecian heroes; the 
total defeat of the Persian host— are commonplaces of history, 
are themes of the schoolroom. That day ranks among the 
great days of the world. Had Xerxes triumphed, Europe had 
become Asiatic, and the trend of history had been changed. 

The three calls of Cincinnatus to the Dictatorship from 
the solitude and cultivation of his Sabine farm, his three tri- 
umphs over the enemies of the Republic, kindled not in his 
breast the fire of pohtical ambition. When the foe was re- 
pelled and his country needed him no longer, he laid down the 

* See Timothy, II., 1-3. 

xn - [ 5 J 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

sword of command for the^R)ugh, left "the pomp and circum- 
stance" of the camp for the quiet of his rural homestead, Hke 
him whose grave hallows the hillside of Mount Vernon — two not- 
able instances of patriotism, making men great in peace no less 
than in war. Need I recall to my readers Regulus, Horatius 
Codes, Brutus, the first consul, whose heroic and patriotic deeds 
have been the exultant theme of the classic authors of Rome? 

Patriotism finds outward and, so to say, material expres- 
sion, in respect for the flag that symbohzes the country, and 
for the chief magistrate who represents it. ; Perhaps it is only 
when an American travels abroad that he 'fully reahzes how 
deep-rooted is his love for his native country. The sentiment 
of patriotism, which may be dormant at home, is aroused and 
quickened in foreign lands. The sight of an American flag 
flying f rpm the mast of a ship in mid-ocean or in some foreign 
port awakes unwonted emotion and enthusiasm. 

The interest which an American feels in a presidential elec- 
tion, or in any other important domestic event, is intensified 
when he is abroad. When I was travelhng through the Tyrol, 
in 1880, 1 had a natural desire to find out who had been nomi- 
nated for the Presidency; but in that country news travels 
slowly. On reaching Innspruck, I learned that Mr. Garfield 
was the nominee. I got my information from an American 
student buried in the cloisters of a seminary, to whom the out- 
side world was apparently dead. I never discovered, and I 
dare say his professors never knew, how he obtained his infor- 
mation. But the news was correct. 

Americans are in the habit of visiting Rome every year 
in large numbers. The greater part of them on their anival 
instinctively repair to the American College. Perhaps, the name 
of the college attracts them; perhaps, also, the consciousness 
that they will hear their mother-tongue. And when they enter 
its portals, where they are always sure to find a warm welcome 
from the genial rector, their eyes are gladdened by the familiar 
features of the " Father of his Country." 

Love of country, as I have described it, which is funda- 
mentally an ethical sentiment, and which was such in all nations, 
even before Christian Revelation was given to the world, and 
XII [ 6 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

which is such to-day among nations that have not heard the 
Christian message, is elevated, ennobled, and perfected by the 
religion of Christ. Patriotism in non-Christian times and races 
has inspired heroism even unto death. We do not pretend 
that Christian patriotism can do more. (But we do say that 
Christianity has given to patriotism, and to the sacrifices it 
demands, nobler motives and higher ideals, j 

If the virtue of patriotism was held in such esteem by pagan 
Greece and Rome, guided only by the hght of reason, how 
much more .should it be cherished by Christians, instructed as 
they are by the voice of Revelation! The Founder of the 
Christian religion has ennobled and sanctified loyalty to coun- 
try by the influence of His example and the force of His teaching. 

When St. Peter was asked by the tax-collector whether his 
Master should pay the tribute money or not, he rej^^jcd in the 
affirmative, and the penniless Master wrought a miracle to 
secure the payment of the money, though He was exempt from 
the obligation by reason of His poverty and his divine origin; 
for if the sons of kings are free from taxation, as Christ Him- 
self remarked on that occasion, the Son of the King of kings 
had certainly a higher claim to exemption. 

The Herodians questioned Jesus whether or not it was 
lawful to pay tribute to Caesar. By this question they sought 
to ensnare Him in His words. If He admitted the obHgation, 
He would have aroused the indignation of the Jews, who deemed 
it unlawful to pay tribute to a Gentile and idolatrous ruler. 
If, on the other hand. He denied the obligation, He would have 
incurred the vengeance of Rome. He made this memorable re- 
ply, which silenced His adversaries : " Render to Caesar the things 
which are Caesar's, and to God the things which are God's." 

The Apostles echo the voice of their Master. "Let every 
soul be subject to higher powers; for there is no power but 
from God. Therefore, he who resisteth the power, resisteth 
the ordinance of God ; and they who resist, purchase for them- 
selves damnation. Render, therefore, to all their dues: trib- 
ute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear 
to whom fear; honor to whom honor." ^ "Be ye subject to 

^Romans, XIII. 

xn [ 7 J 



''PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

every authority for God's ^Kc, whether to the king as ex- 
ceUing, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of 
evil-doers, and for the praise of those who do well."^ This 
short sentence, "There is no authority but from God," has 
contributed more effectually to the stability of nations and to 
the peace and order of society than standing armies and all 
the volumes ever written on the principles of government. It 
ennobles obedience to constituted authority by representing it, 
not as an act of servility to man, but of homage to God. It 
sheds a halo around rulers and magistrates by holding them 
up to us as the representatives of God. It invests all legitimate 
laws with a divine sanction by an appeal to our conscience. 

If the Apostles and the primitive Christians had so much 
reverence for the civil magistrates in whose election they cer- 
tainly had no voice; and if they were so conscientious in ob- 
serving the laws of the Roman Empire, which often inflicted 
on them odious pains and disabihties, how much more respect 
should the American citizen entertain for the civil rulers in 
whose election he actively participates! With what alacrity 
should he fulfil the laws which are framed solely for his peace 
and protection and for the welfare of the Commonwealth ! 

The deification of the State in pagan times rested on a 
principle contrary to reason, and exacted sacrifices destructive 
of the moral worth of the citizen. The State absorbed the 
individual. It was held to be the proprietor and master of the 
citizen, who was only an instrument in its hand, to be used, 
cast aside, or broken at will. Christianity knows how to con- 
ciliate patriotism with the exigencies of man's personal dignity. 
fSocial perfection, or civilization, is in that form of government 
that secures to its members the greater facihty for pursuing 
and attaining their end in Ufe.^i That is the Christian notion 
of the State, and the American aiso, as laid down in the Declara- 
tion of Independence. It is stated therein that government is 
for the citizen, to secure to him his inahenable rights — that is 
to say, rights that are liis and are inahenable by virtue of the 
supreme end marked out for him by the Creator. 

I Again, unhke pagan civilization, which despised the for- 

Peter, II. 
XII [ 8 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

eigner as a barbarian and a foe, Christian and American civili- 
zation sees its ideal in that universal charity revealed to the 
world by Christ, who came to teach the brotherhood of all men 
in the Fatherhood of the One God. Patriotism and cosmo- 
pohtism are not incompatible in the Christian.^ They find a 
model in the rehgious order, in the Catholicity and unity of the 
Church. \And even in the poHtical order, the United States 
offers a miniature picture of the brotherly federation of nations 
— forty-five sovereign States, sovereign and independent as to 
their internal existence, yet presenting to the rest of the world 
a national unity in the federal government J 

And, indeed, when we reflect on the happiness and mani- 
fold temporal blessings which our pohtical institutions have 
already conferred, and are destined in the future to confer, on 
milhons of people, we are not surprised that the American 
citizen is proud of his country, her history, and the record of 
her statesmen. 

Therefore, next to God, our country should hold the strongest 
place in our affections. Impressed, as we ought to be, with a 
profound sense of the blessings which our system of govern- 
ment continues to bestow on us, we shall have a corresponding 
dread lest these blessings should be withdrawn from us. It is 
a sacred duty for every American to do all in his power to per- 
petuate our civil institutions and to avert the dangers that 
threaten them. 

The system of government which obtains in the United 
States is tersely described in the well-known sentence, "A 
government of the people, by the people, for the people " ; which 
may be paraphrased thus: Ours is a government in which the 
people are ruled by the representatives of their own choice, and 
for the benefit of the people themselves. 

Our rulers are called the servants of the people, since they 
are appointed to fulfil the people's wishes; and the people are 
called the sovereign people, because it is by their sovereign 
voice that their rulers are elected. 

The method by which the supreme will of the people is 
registered is the ballot-box. This is the oracle that proclaims 
their choice. This is the balance in which the merits of the 
XII [ 9 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

candidates arc weighed. TllFlicavier scale determines at once 
the decision of the majority and the selection of the candidate. 

And what spectacle is more subhme than the sight of ten 
millions of citizens determining, not by the bullet, but by the 
ballot, the ruler that is to preside over the nation's destinies 

"A weapon that comes down as still 
As snowflakes fall upon the sod ; 
But executes a freeman's will, 

As lightning does the will of God : 
And from its force nor doors nor locks 
Can shield you: 'tis the ballot-box.'' 

But the greatest blessings are Hable to be perverted. Our 
Republic, while retaining its form and name, may degenerate 
into most odious tyranny; and the irresponsible despotism of 
the multitude is more galling, because more difficult to be shaken 
off, than that of the autocrat. ; 

History is philosophy teaching by example. A brief re- 
view of the Roman Republic and the causes of its downfall 
will teach us a useful lesson. The RepubHc prospered so long 
as the citizens practised simplicity of Hfe, and the civil magis- 
trates administered even-handed justice. Avarice and ambi- 
tion proved its ruin.^ The avarice of the poor was gratified 
by the bribery of the rich ; and the ambition of the rich was fed 
by the votes of the poor. 

In the latter days of the Republic bribery and corruption 
were shamefully practised. Marius was elected to the consul- 
ship by the purchase of votes and by collusion with the most 
notorious demagogues. Pompey and Crassus secured the con- 
sulship by intimidation, though neither of them was legally 
quaUfied for that office. The philosophy of Epicuris, intro- 
duced during the last years of the RepubHc, hastened the moral 
and mental corruption of Rome. The loss of the poHtical au- 
tonomy of Greece, which preceded that of Rome, may be 
traced to the same cause. To the early Romans the oath was 
sacred, and perjury a detestable crime. We find in a letter of 

^Primo pecunice, deinde imperii cupido crevit; ea quasi materies 
omnium malorum fuere. (Sallust.) Catalin. C. X. 
XII [ lO ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

Cicero to Atticus a curious incident that shows how far the 
poHticians of his day had departed from former standards, 

"Memmius," he writes, "has just made known to the Senate 
an agreement between himself and an associate candidate for 
the consulship on the one hand, and the two consuls of the 
current year on the other." It appears that the two consuls 
agreed to favor the candidacy of the aspirants on the following 
terms: The two aspirants bound themselves to forfeit to the 
consuls four hundred thousand sesterces if they failed to pro- 
duce in favor of the consuls three augurs who were to swear 
that in their sight and hearing the Plebs (though such was not 
the fact) had voted the law Curiate, a law that invested the 
consuls with full military powers; and also if they failed to 
produce two ex-consuls who were to swear that in their presence 
the Senate had passed and signed a certain decree regulating 
the provinces of each consul, though such was not the fact.^ 
What a crowding of dishonesty in this one transaction! Can 
the worst kind of American poHtics furnish the match of this 
slate gotten up regardless of truth and oath ? 

Cato failed to be elected consul, although eminently worthy 
of that dignity, because he disdained to purchase the office by 
bribes. Caesar had so far debauched the populace with flat- 
tery and bribes, and the soldiers with pensions, that his elec- 
tion to the office of chief pontiff and consul was easily 
obtained. 

During the Empire, elections were usually a mere formality. 
Bribery was open and unblushing. Toward the end of the 
second century the Empire was pubhcly sold at auction to the 
highest bidder. Didius JuHanus, a rich senator, obtained the 
prize by the payment of $620 to each soldier of the Praetorian 
guard. But he was executed after a precarious and inglorious 
reign of sixty-six days. 

The history of the Roman Repubhc and the Roman Empire 
should be a salutary warning to us. Our Christian civihzation, 
gives us no immunity from political corruption and disaster. 
The oft-repeated cry of election frauds should not be treated 
with indifference; though, in many instances, no doubt, it is the 

1 Book IV.. Letter XVIII 
XII [ II ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

empty charge of defeated partisans against successful rivals, or 
the heated language of a party press. 

But after all reasonable allowances are made, enough re- 
mains of a substantial character to be ominous. In every possi- 
ble way, by tickets insidiously printed, by "colonizing," "re- 
peating," and "personation," frauds are attempted, and too 
often successfully, on the ballot. I am informed by a trust- 
worthy gentleman that, in certain locaHties, the adherents of 
one party, while proof against bribes from their political oppo- 
nents, will exact compensation before giving their votes even to 
their own party candidates. The evil would be great enough 
if it were restricted to examples of this kind, but it becomes 
much more serious when large bodies of men are debauched by 
the bribes or intimidated by the threats of wealthy corporations. 

But when the very fountains of legislation are polluted by 
lobbying and other corrupt means; when the hand of bribery 
is extended, and not always in vain, to our municipal, state, 
and national legislators; when our law-makers become the 
pHant tools of some selfish and greedy capitalists, instead of 
subserving the interests of the people — then, indeed, patriotic 
citizens have reason to be alarmed about the future of our 
country. The man who would poison the wells and springs 
of the land is justly regarded as a human monster, as an enemy 
of society, and no punishment could be too severe for him. 
Is he not as great a criminal who would poison and pollute the 
ballot-box, the unfailing fount and well-spring of our civil free- 
dom and of our national life ? 

The Ark of the Covenant was held in the highest venera- 
tion by the children of Israel. It was the oracle from which 
God communicated His will to the people. Two cherubim with 
outstretched wings were placed over it as sacred guardians. 
Oza was suddenly struck dead for profanely touching it. May 
we not, without irreverence, compare the ballot-box to the an- 
cient Ark ? Is it not for us the oracle of God, because it is the 
oracle of the people? God commands us to obey our rulers. 
It is through the ballot-box that our rulers are proclaimed to 
us; therefore, its voice should be accepted as the voice of God. 
Let justice and truth, Hke twin cherubs, guard this sacred in- 

XII [ 12 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

strument. Let him who lays profane hands upon it be made 
to feel that he is guilty of a grievous offence against the 
stability of government, the peace of society, and the majesty 
of God. 

Our Saviour, filled with righteous indignation, seizes a 
scourge and casts out of the Temple those that bought and 
sold in it, and overturns the tables of the money-changers, 
saying: "My house is a house of prayer, but you have made 
it a den of thieves." The polHng booth is a temple, in which 
the angel of justice holds the scales with an even hand. The 
pohtical money-changer pollutes the temple by his iniquitous 
bargains. The money-changer in Jerusalem's Temple traf- 
ficked in doves; the electioneering money-changer traffics in 
human beings. 

Let the minister of justice arise, and, clothed with the pano- 
ply of authority, let him drive those impious men from the 
temple. Let the buyers and sellers of votes be declared in- 
famous; for they are trading in our American birthright. Let 
them be cast forth from the pale of American citizenship and 
be treated as outlaws. 

I do not think the punishment too severe when we con- 
sider the enormity and far-reaching consequences of their crime. 
1 hold that the man who undermines our elective system is 
only less criminal than the traitor who lights against his country 
with a foreign invader. The one compasses his end by fraud, 
the other by force. 

The privilege of voting is not an inherent or inalienable 
right. It is a solemn and sacred trust, to be used in strict ac- 
cordance with the intentions of the authority from which it 
emanates. 

When a citizen exercises his honest judgment in casting his 
vote for the most acceptable candidate, he is making a legiti- 
mate use of the prerogatives confided to him. But when he 
sells or barters his vote, when he disposes of it to the highest 
bidder, hke a merchantable commodity, he is clearly violating 
his trust and degrading his citizenship. 

The enormity of the offence will be readily perceived by 
pushing it to its logical consequences: 
XII [ 13 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

First. Once the purcha^^f votes is tolerated or condoned 
or connived at, the obvious resuh is that the right of suffrage 
becomes a solemn farce. The sovereignty is no longer vested 
in the people, but in corrupt pohticians or in wealthy corpora- 
tions; money instead of merit becomes the test of success; the 
election is determined, not by the personal fitness and integrity 
of the candidate, but by the length of his own or his patron's 
purse; and the aspirant for office owes his victory, not to the 
votes of his constituents, but to the grace of some political 
boss. 

Second. The better class of citizens will lose heart and ab- 
sent themselves from the polls, knowing that it is useless to 
engage in a contest which is already decided by irresponsible 
managers. 

Third. Disappointment, vexation, and righteous indigna- 
tion will bum in the breasts of upright citizens. These senti- 
ments will be followed by apathy and despair of carr}ing out 
successfully a popular form of government. The enemies of 
the Republic will then take advantage of the existing scandals 
to decry our system and laud absolute monarchies. The last 
stage in the drama is political stagnation or revolution. 

But, happily, the American people are not prone to de- 
spondency or to pohtical stagnation, or to revolution outside 
of the Hnes of legitimate reform. They are cheerful and hope- 
ful, because they are conscious of their strength; and well they 
may be, when they reflect on the centur}' of ordeals through 
which they have triumphantly passed. They are vigilant, be- 
cause they are hberty-loving, and they know that "Eternal 
vigilance is the price of hberty." They are an enhghtened 
and practical people; therefore are they quick to detect and 
prompt to resist the first inroads of corruption. They know 
well how to apply the antidote to the pohtical distemper of the 
hour. They have the elasticity of mind and heart to rise to 
the occasion. They will never suffer the stately temple of the 
Constitution to be overthrown, but will hasten to strengthen 
the foundation where it is undermined, to repair every breach, 
and to readjust every stone of the glorious edifice. 

In conclusion, I shall presume to suggest, with all deference, 
xu [14] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

a brief outline of what appear to me the most efficient means 
to preserve purity of elections and to perpetuate our political 
independence- 
Many partial remedies may be named. The main purpose 
of these remedies is to foster and preserve \Yhat may be called 
a Public Conscience. In the individual man, conscience is that 
inner hght which directs him in the knowledge and choice of 
good and evil, that practical judgment which pronounces, over 
every one of his acts, that it is right or wrong, moral or immoral. 
Now, this Hght and judgment which directs man in the ordinary 
personal affairs of life, must be his guide also in the affairs of 
his political life; for he is answerable to God for his political, 
as well as his personal, life. 

The individual conscience is an enhghtenment and a guide; 
and it is itself illumined and directed by the great maxims of 
natural law and the conclusions which the mind is constantly 
deducing from those maxims. Now, is there not a set of maxims 
and opinions that fulfil the office of guides to the masses in 
their pohtical hf e ? 

The means which I propose are : 

First. The enactment of strict and wholesome laws for pre- 
venting briber}' and the corruption of the ballot-box, accom- 
panied with condign punishment against the violators of the 
law. Let such protection and privacy be thrown around the 
polhng booth that the humblest citizen may be able to record 
his vote without fear of pressure or of interference from those 
that might influence him. Such a remedy has already been 
attempted, with more or less success, in some States by the 
introduction of new systems of voting. 

Second. A pure, enhghtened, and independent judiciary to 
interpret and enforce the laws. 

Third. A vigilant and fearless press that will reflect and 
create a healthy pubhc opinion. Such a press, guided by the 
laws of justice and the spirit of Am.erican institutions, is the 
organ and the reflection of national thought, the outer bulwark 
of the rights and liberties of the citizen against the usurpations 
of authority and the injustice of parties, the speediest and most 
direct castigator of vice and dishonesty. It is a duty of the 

XII [15] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

citizen? of a free counti^iiot only lo encourage the press, 
but to cooperate with it; and it is a misfortune for any 
land when its leading men neglect to instruct their country 
and act on public opinion through this powerful instrument 
for good. . 

Fou)'ih.\rhc incorporation into our school system of familiar 
lessons embodying a history of our country, a brief sketch of 
her heroes, statesmen, and patriots, whose civic virtues the 
rising generation will thus be taught to emulate. The duties 
and rights of citizens, along with reverence for our political in- 
stitutions, should likewise be inculcated, as Dr. Andrews, Presi- 
dent of the University of Nebraska, recommended some years 
ago.^ There is danger that the country whose history is not 
known and cherished will become to the masses only an ab- 
straction, or, at best, that it will be in touch with them only on 
its less lovable side, the taxes and burdens it imposes. Men 
lost in an unnatural isolation, strangers to the past life of their 
nation, Hving on a soil to which they hold only by the passing 
interests of the present, as atoms without cohesion, are not able 
to reahze and bring home to themselves the claims of a country 
that not only is, but that was before them, and that will be, as 
history alone can teach, long after them. 

Fifth. A more hearty celebration of our national holidays. 

The Hebrew people, as we learn from Sacred Scripture, 
were commanded to commemorate by an annual observance 
their liberation from the bondage of Pharaoh and their en- 
trance into the Promised Land. In nearly all civihzed countries 
there are certain days set apart to recall some great events in 
their national history, and to pay honor to the memory of the 
heroes who figured in them. The United States has already 
established three national holidays. The first is consecrated 
to the birth of the "Father of his Country"; the second, to the 
birth of the nation ; and the third is observed as a day of Thanks- 
giving to God for His manifold blessings to the nation. On 
those days, when the usual occupations of hfe are suspended, 
every citizen has leisure to study and admire the political in- 
stitutions of his country, and to thank God for the benedictions 
that He has poured out on us as a people. In contemplating 
XII [ i6 ] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

these blessings, we may well repeat with the Royal Prophet: 
"He hath not done in like manner to every nation, and His 
judgments He hath not made manifest to them." 

If holidays are useful to those that are to the manor born, 
they are still more imperatively demanded for the foreign popu- 
lation, which is constantly flowing into our country, and which 
consists of persons who are strangers to our civil institutions. 
The annually recurring hoHdays will create and develop in 
their minds a knowledge of our history and admiration for our 
system of government. It will help, also, to mould our people 
into unity of political faith. By the young, especially, are holi- 
days welcomed with keen dehght; and as there is a natural, 
though unconscious, association in the mind betv/een the civic 
festivity and the cause that gave it birth, their attachment to 
the day will extend to the patriotic event or to the men whose 
anniversary is celebrated. 

Sixth. The maintenance ot party lines is an indispensable 
means for preserving political purity. One party watches the 
other, takes note of its shortcomings, its blunders and defects; 
and it has at its disposal the means for rebuking any abuse of 
power on the part of the dominant side, by appealing to the 
country at the tribunal of the ballot-box. The healthiest periods 
of the Roman Republic were periods of fierce political strife. 
The citizens of Athens were not allowed to remain neutral. 
They were compelled to take sides on all questions of great 
pubHc interest. Not only was every citizen obliged to vote, 
but the successful candidate was bound to accept the office to 
which he was called, and to subordinate his taste for private 
life to the public interests. 

England owes much of her greatness and liberty to the ac- 
tive and aggressive vigilance of opposing political camps. 
Political parties are the outcome of pohtical freedom. Parties 
are not to be confounded with factions. The former contend 
for a principle, the latter struggle for a master. 

To jurists and statesmen these considerations may seem 

trite, elementary, and commonplace. But, like all elementary 

principles, they are of vital import. They should be kept 

prominently in view before the people, and not obscured in a 

XII [17] 



"PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS" 

maze of wordy technicalities. They are landmarks to guide 
men in the path of public duty, and they would vastly contrib- 
ute to the good order and stability of the Commonwealth if 
they w^ere indelibly stamped on the heart and memory of every 
American citizen. 



XII [ i8 ] 



XIII 



AMBITION 

"THE CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS " 

BY 

DR. MAX NORDAU 



Tlf^X SIMON NORDAU stands to-day among the leading 
philosophers and literary men of the world. He is of 
Hebrew origin, was born in Budapesth, and educated there as 
a physician. Persecutions directed at his race and faith drove 
him from Hungary, and for over a quarter century he has re- 
sided in Paris, the centre which has drawn to itself so many 
noted literary men. Dr. Nordau early became known as a novel- 
ist and playwright, and in 1893 his celebrated work ^' Degenera- 
tion^^ drew upon him the attention of the entire world. Medical 
men were as interested as philosophers by this grim, though 
probably exaggerated, pointing out of the symptoms of degeneracy 
in modern life. Since then works of more or less similar char- 
acter, such as ^'The Drones Must Die^'' have kept the author 
prominently before the public. 

The present discourse by Dr. Nordau displays the same 
keenness of analysis, the same monumental honesty, and the 
same irrefutable logic as his longer works. To turn from Nor- 
dau contemptuously as a mere pessimist is childish folly. Rather 
we should look to him in admiration as what he is, the stern 
physician who does not hesitate to search the illnesses of society. 
With his keen scalpel he lays bare each evil, not from a mere 
morbid curiosity as to the progress of disease, but in anxiety to 
understand and cure. It is for us to aid him in his efforts, or 
at least to heed his warning of the danger, and, for ourselves^ 
beware. 

xni [ I ] 



AMBITION 



The reader in these latter days is accustomed to the sight 
of diagrams which show him in what an extraordinary measure 
everything has developed in the last quarter or half century: 
the output of coal and iron; baldness; the population of 
countries and towns; the wealth of individuals and communi- 
ties; the range of guns and the consumption of soap; the 
length of railways and the salaries of tenors; the circulation 
of newspapers, the average length of life, and the number of 
divorces. There is something, however, on which we never 
obtain statistics, although it has developed to a greater extent 
than any other, and that is ambition. 

It has become a commonplace that the great impulse to all 
human effort is hunger and love. This statement is true only 
regarding a certain phase of civilization. The daily bread and 
the woman are the aim of the toil and struggle of man so long 
as he has not raised himself much over the level of animality. 
On a higher degree of development a third stimulus comes 
into play, in many men the strongest of all — Ambition. People 
desire to shine, to become famous; they desire to be admired, 
envied, imitated. Everybody strives to rise above the others, 
to overtake all competitors in the race of life, to win the first 
prize. Formerly the feudal organization of society created 
hard-and-fast limits to the cravings of the individual. The 
low-born, the poor man, could not hope to lift himself much 
above the level on which the accident of his birth had placed 
him. His boldest dreams never carried him beyond the 
extreme limits of his caste. The democratic transformation 
of the peoples has changed this. The emancipation of the 
individual is in some countries complete and in others nearly 
so. Birth and extraction are no longer obstacles. Energy 
and talent, but of course smartness and unscrupulousness 
also, are keys to every door. Forces now have full play, free 
from the fetters of prejudice. "Quo non ascendam," cries 
in Dionysian intoxication every youngster who enters the 
arena of hfe, to take up the struggle for existence. 

Nowhere is ambition so general and so boundless as in 

xin [2] 



AMBITION 

America. This is natural, for nowhere is the individual so 
liighly differentiated as in America, nowhere is he so full of 
inborn energy, so rich in initiative, resource, optimism, and 
self-contidence; nowhere is he so little tethered by pedantry, 
and nowhere are people so willing to recognize the value of a 
brilliant personality, however this may find expression. 

To this it must be added, that in America the instances in 
which men have risen from the most humble beginnings to the 
most fabulous destinies, are more numerous and striking than 
anywhere else. A Lincoln who develops from a woodcutter into 
a President ; a Mr. Schwab who at twenty years earned a dollar 
a day and at thirty-five has a salary of a million; a Mr. Car- 
negie who as a youth did not know where to find a shilling to 
buy primers, and as a man in mature life does not know how to 
get rid reasonably and usefully of his three hundred milHon 
dollars, must suggest to every woodcutter, every "buttons," 
every factory apprentice with the scantiest elementary school- 
ing, the idea that it only depends on himself to tread in the 
footsteps of a Lincoln, a Mr. Schwab, or a Mr. Carnegie, and 
to reach the goal that these celebrities have attained. 

The Horatian Aurea mediocritas has nowhere so few parti- 
sans as in America. "Everybody ahead" is the national 
motto. ' I suppress intentionally the second half of the smart 
sentence. The universal ideal of the American people seems 
to be success. The dream of success feeds the fancy of the 
child, hypnotizes the youth, gives the man temerity, tenacity, 
and perseverance, and only begins to become a matter of 
indifference under the sobering influence of advanced age. 

Success, however, is but one of those vague words which 
mean nothing definite, but which, Hke "freedom" or "prog- 
ress," are mere recipients filled by everybody with a different 
content. A well-known exercise in experimental psychology 
consists in asking a number of persons to indicate what images 
emerge in their consciousness when an abstract term is sud- 
denly pronounced in their presence. In this manner we suc- 
ceed in distinguishing the concrete elements out of which an 
abstract notion is composed. 

If one were to ask a number of Americans what they iinag- 

XIII [ 3 ] 



AMBITION 

I 

ine by success, one woi^^ evidently receive very different 
answers. Many would reply: Success means money. To be 
successful is synonymous with owning a palace, a yacht, a 
private Pullman car, with eating off gold plate, having the most 
expensive box in the Opera House, buying one's wife the largest 
diamonds in the market and one's daughter an English duke, 
or astonishing the world by the price of one's pictures, the 
number of one's pairs of trousers, and the amount of one's 
stakes at poker. 

This is, of course, the coarsest view of wealth. It does not 
go beyond the most brutal selfishness and the mental horizon of 
an illiterate publican. Men of higher intellectual and moral 
attainment who hunt after wealth dream of making a nobler 
use of their gold. They desire to found universities and 
libraries, create museums, put up public monuments, assist 
talent, reward genius, to be the providence of the poor and the 
sick, and spread faith. In the one case as in the other, one is 
greedy for money on account of the power it incarnates, the 
power to satisfy low appetites or nobler aspirations, provoking 
whims or philanthropic sympathies, to gall one's fellow-men, 
or to be of use to them. 

For others, success means the esteem of their fellow-country- 
men. They do not desire to present them with money, they 
desire to give them the work of their brains. They see them- 
selves as popular orators, as admired administrators, poli- 
ticians, legislators. They dream of enthusiastic receptions by 
cheering crowds, of electoral victories, and of holding offices 
from mayor of their native place to President of the United 
States. 

Yet another category understand success in one shape only, 
as fame. To be known to the whole world — to find that one's 
name is a household word with all people of education — what 
"consummation devoutly to be wish'd!" a goal which seems 
higher and more comprehensive than that of the millionaire or 
the public man. For with fame, so at least those believe who 
strive for it, goes also pecuniary reward, and the respect and 
admiration of one's fellow-men. 

XIII [ 4 ] 



AMBITION 



II 



To weigh the moral and material value of these various 
forms of success, one against the other, is clearly not easy. 

There exists no common measure for them. Their propor- 
tional estimation depends upon the conception of the world and 
life, the temperament, the coarser or finer soul-fibre of the person 
estimating them. It is emphatically a case for the application 
of the classic fable of the stork and the fox who invite each 
other to a meal. The fox can naturally do nothing with the 
long narrow pitcher of the stork, while the latter is equally 
helpless with the broad shallow dish of the fox. It all depends 
on whether one has a muzzle or a long bill. 

It will probably be most difficult to come to an agreement 
regarding the value of the ideal of those for whom success takes 
the form of a mountain of gold, because not many people have 
the moral courage to deal with the problem sincerely; in their 
hearts they probably all value wealth, but it is considered low- 
minded and vulgar to admit this, while it seems noble and 
superior to make a show of despising money. 

Now to despise money is very foolish, as it means to despise 
force, and force is the essence of the universe. Money in itself 
is nothing and means nothing. It is a mere symbol. It is a 
conventional representation of the whole of civilization. It 
virtually includes everything that up to this hour man has 
created with his many-sided mental and bodily efforts; what 
he has wrested from Nature in a struggle of giants of thousands 
of years, and has brought to a form suitable for human needs. 
Whoever boasts that he despises money, boasts that he de- 
spises the pictures of Leonardo and Velasquez, the statues of 
Michael Angelo, Carpeaux and Paul Dubois, the view on the 
north Italian lakes, the gulf of Naples and the giants of the 
Alps, the voice of De Reszke and Patti, the violin playing of 
Joachim and Sarasate, the wisdom of Mr. Herbert Spencer, 
the science of Lord Kelvin, and the inventiveness of Edison. 
For all these one can procure with money. That money can 
also be expended in vulgar fashion is not the fault of the money, 
but of those who spend it in a vulgar fashion. 

xiii [ 5 ] 



AMBITION 

At bottom one cannot yBhic the young man who, when he 
starts out on the race of hie, makes as his goal the milhards of 
a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. He can think out for himself a 
good or a bad, a wise or a foolish, a useful or a harmful employ 
of them, and according to his choice will his ambition be 
attractive or repulsive. 

It is true that a father, a tutor, a friend of even moderate 
wisdom only, will never advise the young man to make the 
conquest of milliards the task of his Hfe. The prospects of 
passing the winning-post as victor are extremely unfavor- 
able, the probabilities that in the struggle for excessive wealth 
he will lose his health, his peace of mind, his better self, per- 
haps his very life, are very great. The possession of the 
milliard may be a happiness; the earning of the milliard is cer- 
tainly a work which peremptorily excludes every idea of hap- 
piness. The road to the milliard leads through all the circles 
of Dante's Inferno. Supposing the goal to be the paradise, the 
traveller arrives there in a condition which leaves him but Httle 
capacity for enjoying its bliss. The milliardaire who lives on 
a daily pint of milk of the value of six cents, and who in vain 
exhausts all the resources of human invention in striving to 
obtain a few hours of sleep, has become a common type in mod- 
ern fiction, and I believe the portrait is true to Hfe. 

Providence has happily arranged that trees do not reach the 
heavens. Great wealth can only be gained from man. It is 
never the prize of solitary contemplation or secluded work at 
the desk in the cosey study. One must go to seek it in the 
market place, among the crowd. One must handle, outdo, 
overcome, or crush innumerable people. One must be more 
clever, have more will power, or be more artful than other men. 
This presupposes qualities which are not possessed by one man 
in a milhon. The young apprentice millionaire, when he is not 
a fool, soon sees that he is not cut in the material from which 
milHardaires are made. He calculates that on the whole there 
is no business which pays so httle as the chase after the milliard, 
he abandons the race in time, before he breaks down, and de- 
votes his energies to aims which are closer at hand, and reaches, 
not the fabulous milliards, but probably an honest competence. 
XIII [ 6 ] 



AMBITION 

The ambition to conquer a prominent situation m public 
life can be better encouraged. It is from its nature more moral 
than that for the mere possession of money. It is by definition 
social. The efforts it necessitates are compatible with health 
and happiness. It is true that here also we have the broad 
road and the narrow path. One can, in order to gain popu- 
larity, appeal to the bad instincts of the crowd as well as to 
the good. One may be the cad, parasite, and corrupter of the 
people, or its stern educator, warner, and critic. One can arrive 
at the Capitol through Tammany Hall or by heroism on Cuban 
battlefields. Whoever is not an incurable pessimist will at 
least admit the possibility that honesty, firmness of character, 
sound common sense, public spirit, sympathy with one's 
fellow-man, a little geniality, and a httle gift of the gab, will 
sufficiently designate the possessor of these qualities, which 
are not over rare, even in their happy assemblage, to the esteem 
and confidence of his neighbors to assure him a reasonable, if 
perhaps not phenomenal, success in public life. The greater 
the number of citizens who have this kind of ambition, the 
better for the community; for their fruitful emulation, when 
it is controlled by a well-developed public sense of morality, 
strengthens the national solidarity, and recruits constantly 
precious forces for the work of the commonweal. In the 
struggle for success of this order, disappointment is not prob- 
able, for if the competitors are many, so also are the prizes. 
Csesar preferred to be the first in the village rather than 
the second in Rome. Now to be first in Rome is difficult 
enough, but the alternative leaves Ceesar the choice of 50,000 
situations. 

The thirst for fame seems to be the most ideal ambition. 
It is the most foolish of all. In no case is the appearance so 
different from the reality as in the case of celebrity. To him 
who does not possess it, it seems the sum total of all that is 
splendid. He who, according to the general opinion of his 
contemporaries, possesses it, sees that it contains much more 
bitterness than satisfaction, and that it is not worth either a 
night's sleep or a day's effort. 

To nothing can the "vanity of vanities" of the preacher 
XIII [ 7 ] 



AMBITION 

be so well applied as to ^Rebrity. Dante devoted to it the 
Terzina: — 

"Non e '1 mondan rumor altro ch'un fiato 
Del vento ch' or vien quinci ed or vien quindi, 
E Gambia nome perche cambia lato." 

"World-renown is nothing but a break of wind, which 
blows sometimes from here, sometimes from there, and takes 
another name because it comes from another direction." 

All that Falstaff said of honor, which replaces no lost 
limb and brings no dead to hfe, holds good of fame. What 
real use, what tangible advantage does it bring the celebrated 
man? His name is familiar to the world, but often enough 
the people who know it have no precise idea of the reason why 
they know it, and of the signification of the name. 

Sir Richard Wallace presented the Parisians with some 
hundreds of public fountains. They arc, as is meet, known as 
"Wallace Fountains," and have rendered his name a familiar 
sound to the man in Parisian streets. A reporter once over- 
heard the following dialogue between two Paris workmen: 
" Old Wallace is dead ! " " What old Wallace ? " "You know 
quite well what Wallace, the man who made his fortune in 
fountains." 

Fualdes is another name celebrated throughout France. It 
is that of a man who was cruelly murdered in the beginning 
of the nineteenth century. This tragic occurrence gave rise to 
a ballad which still lives in the mouth of the people. Let 
any one ask the average Frenchman if he knows Fualdes. 
Out of a hundred thus asked, ninety- nine will answer, "Fualdes ? 
Certainly! the famous murderer!" 

The visiting lady of a Sunday-school asked the children, 
"Do you know what a poet is?" "Yes," answered a dozen 
voices. "Give me a name." "Shakespeare." "Very good; 
now do you know what Shakespeare wrote ? " General silence, 
finally broken by a clear voice, "The Bible, mum." 

What does the celebrated man personally experience from 
his fame ? He receives daily a bushel of letters, asking him for 
autographs, the minority of them with stamps for reply, many 
insufficiently prepaid, some not prepaid at all. Unknown 

XIII [ 8 ] 



AMBITION 

persons honor him with confidential requests for assistance. 
Interviewers force their way in on him when he is obhged to 
work or when he would like to rest, bother him with indiscreet 
questions, and put idiotic replies in his mouth. Everybody 
claims the right to take up his time with undesired visits 
or egotistical letters, and he makes himself active, deadly 
foes, when he does not answer their letters or receive the 
visits. 

Authors send him more books than he could get through in 
ten hfetimes entirely devoted to reading, and expect from him 
an exhaustive judgment, with his reasons for forming it. If 
he puts off the bore with a few non-compromising phrases, 
without opening the work, he is soon found out, and denounced 
as a hypocrite and a liar. If he frankly declares that he has no 
time for books which do not lie within his speciality, then he 
gets the name of being an ill-mannered boor and narrow- 
minded pedant. Every imbecile thinks it his duty to give his 
opinion about him, and many of these imbeciles put their 
opinion in print. People who also desired to become famous, 
but who, strange to say, have not become so, revenge themselves 
on him by spreading libellous anecdotes about him, and these 
anecdotes naturally find a greater number of people to repeat 
them and believe them, according to his degree of celebrity. 
If it gives him pleasure that the newspapers should occupy 
themselves with him, his enjoyment will be marred by his 
observing that the murderer of the day is given more space 
than the poet of the century. Czolgosz was, I believe, more 
spoken of in the Press in fourteen days than Tolstoi in a 
decade. 

The flattering conviction that his fame reaches to the con- 
fines of the globe is supposed to indemnify the celebrated man 
for all these personal inconveniences. But to what humilia- 
tions he exposes himself if he tries personally to test his degree 
of fame! People have always believed that the best-known 
name of the nineteenth century was that of Napoleon I. One 
day, however, Prince Napoleon, "Plon Plon," came medita- 
tively to his palace and said to the guests awaiting him, among 
whom were Sainte-Beuve and Renan, that he had just had a 
XIII [ 9 ] 



AMBITION 

conversation under the arcades of the Palais Royal with a 
woman born and brought up in Paris who had never heard the 
name of Napoleon and had no notion of who he was. 

Ill 

It is exactly for this imaginary value, for fame, which 
neither offers the individual the tangible satisfactions of ex- 
cessive wealth nor the community the advantage of the am- 
bitious struggle for civic honors, that the most passionate greed 
exists. 

This is easy to understand. The law of the least resistance 
explains the phenomenon. 

The young man on the threshold of active life, who desires 
to become famous, naturally strikes upon the idea to try it by 
writing a book. He will become an author and win laurels 
with his pen. This requires the minimum of working capital 
and allows him to cling longest to subjective illusions. 

Should the ambitious young man try for fame in a public 
career, he will soon be convinced that success cannot be at- 
tained by him if he has not the necessary qualities. He will 
fail at the polls ; people will refuse to listen to his public speeches ; 
he will return empty-handed from the hunt for office. That 
will, if he is at all capable of forming a judgment, open his eyes, 
and he will cease an effort which he is forced to see has no 
prospect of success. 

Should he desire to become a milliardaire, every-day hfe 
will rapidly make it clear to him whether or not he has anything 
to hope for in this field. He will know at any minute the exact 
amount of his cash box. He will know what he is worth. 
Figures speak loudly and clearly, and they will tell him if his 
efforts are bearing fruit or not. We meet, it is true, people 
down at heel and out at elbow who are always on the track of 
phantom-like millions, but these poor fools are the laughing- 
stocks of their acquaintances. Men, too, are not too scarce 
who have actually climbed to the summit of the gold mountain, 
but have been hurled headlong down, to lie at the foot with 
broken limbs. These keep to the end of their lives the hope 
XIII [ lO ] 



AMBITION 

of once more reaching the top, and the memory of their short 
moment of glory makes them incapable of a sober comprehen- 
sion of their position. They belong to the most lamentable 
victims of the battle of life. 

The man, on the contrary, who hopes to win fame with the 
pen can for a very long time, perhaps forever, waste his strength 
and his time without being forced to the admission that he has 
failed to find the proper way. In order to create an immortal 
masterpiece, all that is required is some paper, ink, and a pen. 
This represents a starting capital of say ten cents. So much 
even the poor street arab can find. It is true that to the writing 
material something must be added — Genius. But this the 
ambitious youth believes he possesses. He therefore sits down 
and writes. The work will probably turn out to his satisfac- 
tion; for the less talent a man has, the more mild is his judg- 
ment of his efforts. Who is to open his eyes to the worthless- 
ness of his work ? His friends, if he finds them ready to listen 
to, or read, his elucubrations, will say to him, "That is trash." 
He will at once reply, "Pearls before swine." He will find 
no publisher. This only will depress him, but will not open 
his eyes, as he will mentally enumerate all the anecdotes of 
masterworks which were refused with contempt by a dozen 
pubhshers, until the thirteenth printed it reluctantly, thereby 
acquiring fame and fortune. 

Let us assume the book is not so very bad, only mediocre; 
it is printed and comes on the market. The critics silence 
it to death — "Naturally, the conspiracy of silence!" The 
critic gives it a notice and says frankly that it would have been 
better left unwritten, without any loss to anybody and with 
distinct advantage to the author and publisher — "The critics 
are asses." The public refuses to buy the book — "They are 
fools; they are not ripe for my art or my wisdom." Thus 
can an author go for a whole Hfetime, from failure to failure, 
without comprehending that the cause lies in himself. His 
self-consciousness resists every attack like an adamantine 
rock. He is clothed in armor, impenetrable to reality, by 
his illusions. He will die in the conviction that he was an 
unrecognized genius, and that posterity will accord to him the 

XIII [ II ] 



AMBITION 

justice that was refused to him by the blindness of his con- 
temporaries. 

The number of these unhappy people is counted in the 
world by the hundreds of thousands. Their useless life work 
represents a waste of energy of the worst kind. Had they no 
ambition, they would probably be of economic and moral 
value for themselves and the community. Had they not this 
passion for fame, they would probably in every walk of life meet 
with that moderate success which spells happiness. Whoever 
should find a means to convince this army of deluded dreamers 
that in the struggle in which they have engaged victory is a rare 
exception, and when it is really achieved has only an imaginary 
value, would be one of the greatest benefactors of mankind. 

IV 

Literary ambition has one side to which I would like to 
draw special attention. It not only requires but the smallest 
capital, it seems also to impose the smallest measure of dis- 
cipline. Any other work seems more jealous and tyrannical 
than literary work. I have already said that for a masterpiece 
of literature a sheet of paper, a pen, and some ink suffices. 
This paper one can write upon at any time and in any place, 
in the garret or on the bench in the public promenade, by day 
or by night. The temptation is great to regard literary occu- 
pation as something that one can carry on as a by-occupation, 
in the pauses of work, in the night hours, on Sundays and 
holidays. How many young people get the idea of trying 
literature because the attempt costs nothing. It is so inviting 
to gamble for fame without the game requiring any stake. 
Every other occupation in which one hopes to achieve success 
demands peremptorily the whole man. One must devote 
body and soul to it, give up to every minute of one's time 
and every thought of one's brain. Did it ever occur to any one 
to found a great Trust in his leisure moments, or to stand, by 
way of an amateur sport, for a post as senator or governor? 
Everybody knows he can do nothing else when he does this, 
and if he is not rich and does not soon achieve success, he will 
xin [ 12 ] 



AMBITION 

speedily enough abandon an occupation which brings nothing 
in and hinders him earning his hving by more remunerative 
work. 

Literature, on the contrary, seems suitable for a by-occu- 
pation; it seems an excellent plan for the utihzation of time- 
offals. It brings the apprentice, the beginner, no return, but 
it also costs him nothing. It generously permits the poor man, 
who has nothing but his time, his ambitions, and his hopes, to 
earn the indispensable by some prosaic work, and to content 
himself with such spare time as he can find after the paid 
labor. It is a tempting thought for an impecunious but ener- 
getic youth that want of means is not a hindrance to the achiev- 
ing of literary fame. He proudly proclaims, "I work by day 
to earn my bread, and by night to win fame*" 

The formula is, however, a delusion. The sooner he gives 
it up, the better it will be for him who has selected it as his 
rule of Hf e. The most ordinary common sense should teach 
everybody that it is quite hopeless with half one's strength and 
during the hours of fatigue after a long day's work to try to 
win prizes in a career that is open to every one, which for that 
reason is the most crowded, and where the competition is the 
keenest and most pitiless that can be imagined. In a horse- 
race a difference of half a pound may be decisive for the victory. 
A sleepless night would deprive a Derby favorite of all chance. 
In every sporting competition the greatest care is taken that 
the competitors are in the very best form and not handicapped 
by any fatigue, any preoccupation, any indisposition. But 
the same young man who would never dream of competing 
for a championship in some athletic sport after a day's work 
for his daily bread, because he knows that it would be ridiculous 
to measure himself against a trained, fresh, professional com- 
petitor, if he is not himself in equally good condition, will not 
hesitate under the same predisposition to take up the struggle 
for a literary prize. 

A lady of society once asked Newton how he had made 
his famous discovery of the law of gravitation. Sir Isaac 
answered, "By constantly thinking of it, madam." That is, 
together with inborn talent, the secret of each intellectual 

xni [ 13 ] 



AMBITION 

achievement. The insjilRtion comes, perhaps, suddenly, 
though this is in no way proved, for it is Hkely, even probable, 
that the possible sudden irruption of an idea of genius into 
consciousness was preceded by a may- be long preparatory 
work below the threshold of consciousness, on which the 
usual occupation of the mind may have exercised great influ- 
ence. But inspiration is not everything. In a literary work 
the working out is quite as important, and the elaboration, in 
order to be perfect, demands all the concentration of which 
one is capable, all attention, all freshness of brain; in short, 
according to Sir Isaac Newton's formula, "constant thinking 
of it." 

It is imaginable that a man who by day earns his bread by 
any kind of work may devote, with good results, a portion of 
his nights to acquiring education. Even this double activity 
of course is harmful to health, but if it does not last too long 
and is not too recklessly overdone, it need not necessarily 
destroy it. The memory retains what it can. If a man is too 
fatigued by his day's work or too preoccupied, he will not 
profit by night study. One must linger longer over a page of a 
book; it requires months to learn things which one with a fresh, 
well-concentrated, well-rested brain would acquire in weeks 
or days. The goal will be later and more painfully reached, 
but it can be reached, and, once one possesses the knowledge, 
no one can perceive that it was acquired in hours which should 
have been devoted to sleep. 

There are enough examples of successful men who work for 
their daily bread by day and study by night. George Smith, 
born in 1840, was an engraver who earned 48s. a week. He 
had to engrave the plates for Sir Henry Rawlinson's great work 
on Assyriology. This work interested him. He had the daring 
idea of studying the Assyrian language and cuneiform writing. 
He did this in the night and in his leisure moments with super- 
human application, and with the result that after two years' 
work, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed to a position 
in the Assyrian Department of the British Museum, and soon 
after became world-famous as the discoverer and decipherer 
of the cuneiform version of the biblical story of the Flood, 
xni [ 14 ] 



AMBITION 

He died of the plague at Aleppo, when only thirty-six years 
old. 

Another and not less characteristic case is that of Michael 
Faraday. This great scientist, who lived from 1791 to 1867, 
was at twenty-two years old a poor ignorant bookbinder, who 
earned perhaps 30s. a week. He had a consuming thirst for 
knowledge and no means of stilhng it. He greedily devoured 
the books given him to bind, acquired bit by bit some elements 
of knowledge, and obtained, by means of it, admission to a 
physical laboratory, where his genius could freely develop 
itself. 

Similar, only reversed, is the case of the celebrated Professor 
of Clinical Medicine in the Paris Faculty, J. Jaccoud.' In 
addition to his gift for medicine he had a pretty talent for the 
violin. He obtained a place in an orchestra, played half the 
night in the theatres and at balls, earned in this fashion 
perhaps 200 francs a month, and was able to study medicine 
by day. 

It is, however, one thing to learn, something different to 
create. The memory still continues to serve after a long, 
trying day's work; the creative force of the imagination cannot 
then possibly be at its height. With a tired brain one learns 
more slowly, but one learns ; one creates not slower, but weaker, 
worse, or not at all. It does not alter the quality of knowledge 
that one acquired it under pecuHar difficulties; the quality 
of a literary work is incurably deteriorated by being conceived 
and carried out by an exhausted brain. I have been able to 
give examples of scientists who worked by day for bread and 
by night for knowledge, and it would be easy to add to these 
other similar cases. I know, however, no single example 
where a man after the daily work for bread has produced in 
the night hours a work which achieved fame. 

This affirmation needs being qualified on one point only. 
Short lyrical poems could, under such circumstances, as a 
matter of exception, be successfully composed, because in this 
case the inspiration is everything, and the elaboration demands 
less material work than a novel, a drama, or a great essay. 
The few men who, by amateur work in the night after their 

XIII [ 15 ] 



AMBITION 

professional work by d^^have acquired fame in literature 
are all lyric poets. I may name the New York Ghetto-poet 
Morris Rosenfcld, who by day worried himself as tailor in a 
sweating-shop for a pittance, and at night composed songs in 
Jewish jargon of deep emotion, which endeared him to all who 
understand this jargon. Johanna Ambrosius, a simple East 
Prussian peasant woman, looked after her household, did her 
duty as wife and mother of a numerous family, and made use 
of her rare hours of leisure to write poems. Her verses had on 
their publication great success. It is true that this is to be 
ascribed more to a sentimental interest in the fate of the poetess 
than to the value of the poems themselves. 

Other examples which one might cite prove nothing. Hans 
Sachs was a famous poet without ceasing to be a shoemaker. 
But then, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a handi- 
craft had, according to the German saying, "a golden bottom," 
and Hans Sachs was sufficiently well-to-do to have as much 
time to spare for writing poetry as he desired. John Bunyan 
first began to write when he had laid aside the tinker's tools 
and lived by his preaching. The Pilgrim'' s Progress is the work 
of a man who, while he was writing his book, thought of nothing 
else. Robert Burns had, as a farmer, spare time in the winter 
months, apart from the fact that a lyrical genius can compose 
a short song while he is driving the plough. The barber 
Jasmin (i 798-1 864), the well-known Provencal poet, really 
handled the razor, scissors, and comb less than the pen, and it 
was shrewd coquetterie on his part that he still kept his barber's 
shop when, in fact, he was nothing else but a professional 
writer. 

It is not the night work of itself that is incompatible with 
good literary work. Schiller, when he was in full swing, wrote 
the whole night through in spite of the great harm it did his 
health, and Lord Byron preferred to compose at night in com- 
pany with a bottle of brandy. But these men had no different 
day occupation to distract them. They had no other idea in 
their heads, day and night, but their work. 

Only by means of this complete concentration is success 
possible. Good literary work suffers no other occupation 
XIII [ 16 ] 



AMBITION 

beside it. Whoever is so poor that he must earn his bread by 
subaltern labor will seek in vain to pursue fame in the night 
hours. He will not achieve celebrity, but will certainly en- 
danger his health and shorten his life. 

In every other field overwork only harms the worker. In the 
field of literature it harms the work. In ancient time it was 
already a reproach when a critic remarked that a book smelt 
of the oil of the midnight lamp. When to the smell of that 
oil is added that of the sweat of a heterogeneous day- worker.- 
the book will be completely unpalatable. 



XIII [ 17 ] 



XIV 



OUR PAST 

"THE LESSON OF THE PAST" 

BY 

MAURICE MAETERLINCK 



cr'HE materialist, as represented hy Nordau, looks to the 
-^ material, and life seems shallow. The idealist sees 
m it a deeper meaning and a greater worth. Maurice Maeter- 
linck, the well-known Belgian writer, has been called a 
mystic, and the word has led some over-busy folk to dismiss 
him from mind as an idle dreamer; yet he is held by many 
critics to be the most valuable of living philosophers. It has been 
said of him that he bids fair to increase ^Hhe world^s permanent 
stock of wisdom.''^ There have been few men in any one cen- 
tury for whom this high claim could be made. 

Let us then approach with Maeterlinck the heights of medita- 
tion. Here is no scientific measuring of material things, but an 
attempt to grasp the meaning of things immeasurable, to readjust 
our ways of thinking and our entire plane of thought. What 
is said here is true. It is more than true, it is divinely inspiring, 
encouraging, and resurrecting. It is such a word as the proph- 
ets gave to man. To dismiss it with an idle, scurried read- 
ing, such as one gives the latest novel, is a folly that reacts upon 
the reader. To meditate and ponder well upon its thought 
may mean a revolution in a gloomy life, a reformation in a 
wasted one. 

I 

Our past stretches behind us in long perspective. It slum- 
bers on the far horizon like a deserted city shrouded in mist. 
A few peaks mark its boundary, and soar predominant into the 
air; a few important acts stand out, hke towers, some with 
XIV [ I ] 



OUR PAST 

the light still upon them, others half ruined and slowly de- 
caying beneath the weight of oblivion. The trees are bare, 
the walls crumble, and shadow slowly steals over all. Every- 
thing seems to be dead there, and rigid, save only when memory, 
slowly decomposing, lights it for an instant with an illusory 
gleam. But apart from this animation, derived only from 
our expiring recollections, all would appear to be definitely 
motionless, immutable forever; divided from present and future 
by a river that shall not again be crossed. 

In reahty it is alive; and, for many of us, endowed with a 
profounder, more ardent life than either present or future. In 
reahty this dead city is often the hotbed of our existence : and 
in accordance with the spirit in which men return to it shall 
some find all their wealth there, and others lose what they have. 

II 

Our conception of the past has much in common with our 
conception of love and happiness, destiny, justice, and most 
of the vague but therefore not less potent spiritual organisms 
that stand for the mighty forces we obey. Our ideas have been 
handed down to us ready-made by our predecessors; and 
even when our second consciousness wakes, and, proud in its 
conviction that henceforth nothing shall be accepted blindly, 
proceeds most carefully to investigate these ideas, it will squan- 
der its time questioning those that loudly protest their right 
to be heard, and pay no heed to the others close by, that as 
yet, perhaps, have said nothing. Nor have we, as a rule, far to 
go to discover these others. They are in us and of us: they 
wait for us to address them. They are not idle, notwith- 
standing their silence. Amid the noise and babble of the 
crowd, they are tranquilly directing a portion of our real Ufe; 
and as they are nearer the truth than their self-satisfied sisters, 
they will often be far more simple, and far more beautiful too. 

Ill 

Among the most stubborn of these ready-made ideas are 
those that preside over our conception of the past, and render 
it a force as imposing and rigid as destiny; a force that indeed 
XIV [ 2 ] 



OUR PAST 

becomes destiny working backward, with its hand outstretched 
to the destiny that burrows ahead, to which it transmits the 
last Hnk of our chains. The one thrusts us back, the other 
urges us forward, with a hke irresistible violence. But the 
violence of the past is perhaps more terrible, and more alarm- 
ing. One may disbelieve in destiny. It is a god whose on- 
slaught many have never experienced. But no one would 
dream of denying the oppressiveness of the past. Sooner or 
later its effect must inevitably be felt. Those even who re- 
fuse to admit the intangible, will credit the past, which their 
finger can touch, with all the mystery, the influence, the sov- 
ereign intervention whereof they have stripped the powers 
that they have dethroned; thus rendering it the almost unique 
and therefore more dreadful god of their depopulated 
Olympus. 

IV 

The force of the past is indeed one of the heaviest that 
weigh upon men and incline them to sadness. And yet there 
is none more docile, more eager to follow the direction we 
could so readily give, did we but know how best to avail our- 
selves of this docility. In reahty, if we think of it, the past 
belongs to us quite as much as the present, and is far more 
malleable than the future. Like the present, and to a much 
greater extent than the future, its exsistence is all in our thoughts 
and our hand controls it; nor is this only true of our material 
past, wherein there are ruins that we perhaps can restore; it 
is true also of the regions that are closed to our tardy desire 
for atonement, it is true above all of our moral past, and of 
what we consider to be most irreparable there. 

V 

"The past is past," we say, and it is false: the past is 
always present. "We have to bear the burden of our past," 
we sigh; and it is false; the past bears our burden. "Noth- 
ing can wipe out the past"; and it is false: the least effort 
of will sends present and future travelhng over the past, to 
efface whatever we bid them efface. "The indestructible, 
XIV [3] 



OUR PAST 



irreparable, immutable pa"" And that is no truer than the 
rest. In those who speak thus it is the present that is immu- 
table, and knows not how to repair. "My past is wicked, it is 
sorrowful, empty," we say again: "As I look back I can see 
no moment of beauty, of happiness, or love: I see nothing 
but wretched ruins. . • ." And that is false; for you see 
precisely what you yourself place there at the moment your 
eyes rest upon it. 

VI 

Our past depends entirely upon our present, and is con- 
stantly changing with it. Our past is contained in our memory, 
and this memory of ours, that feeds on our heart and brain, and 
is incessantly swayed by them, is the most variable being in 
the world, the least independent, the most impressionable. 
Our chief concern with the past, that which truly remains and 
forms part of us, is not what we have done or the adventures 
that we have met with, but the moral reactions bygone events 
are producing within us at this very moment, the inward being 
that they have helped to form; and these reactions, whence 
there arises our sovereign, intimate being, are wholly governed 
by the manner in which we regard past events, and vary as 
the moral substance varies that they encounter within us. But 
with every step in advance that our feelings or intellect takes 
will come a change in this moral substance, and then, on the 
instant, the most immutable facts, that seemed to be graven 
forever on the stone and bronze of the past, will assume an en- 
tirely different aspect, will return to Hfe and leap into move- 
ment, bringing us vaster and more courageous counsels, drag- 
ging memory aloft with them in their ascent; and what was 
once a mass of ruin, mouldering in the darkness, becomes 
a populous city whereon the sun shines again. 

VII 

We have an arbitrary fashion of establishing a certain 

number of events behind us. We relegate them to the horizon 

of our memory, and having set them there we tell ourselves 

that they form part of a world in which the united efforts of 

XIV [ 4 ] 



OUR PAST 

all mankind could not wipe away a tear or cause a flower to 
raise its head. And yet, while admitting that these events 
have passed beyond our control, we still, with the most curious 
inconsistency, believe that they have full control over us. 
Whereas the truth is that they can only act upon us to the 
extent in which we have renounced our right to act upon them. 
The past asserts itself only in those whose moral growth has 
ceased; then, and not till then, does it truly become redoubta- 
ble. From that moment we have indeed the irreparable be- 
hind us and the weight of what we have done lies heavy upon 
our shoulders. But so long as the life of our mind and charac- 
ter flows uninterruptedly on, so long will the past remain in 
suspense above us; and, as the glance may be that we send 
toward it, will it, complaisant as the clouds Hamlet showed to 
Polonius, adopt the shape of the hope or fear, the peace or 
disquiet, that we are perfecting within us. 

VIII 

No sooner has our moral activity weakened than accom- 
plished events rush forward and assail us; and woe to him 
who opens the door and permits them to take possession of 
his hearth! Each one will vie with the other in overwhelming 
him with the gifts best calculated to shatter his courage. It 
matters not whether our past has been happy and noble, or 
lugubrious and criminal, the danger shall be no less if we per- 
mit it to enter, not as an invited guest, but like a parasite 
settling upon us. The result will be either sterile regret or 
impotent remorse, and remorse and regrets of this kind are 
equally disastrous. In order to draw from the past what is 
precious within it — and most of our wealth is there — we must 
go to it at the hour when we are strongest, most conscious of 
mastery; enter its domain and make choice there of what we 
require, discarding the rest, and commanding it never to cross 
our threshold without our order. Like all things that only 
can live at the cost of our spiritual strength, it will soon learn 
to obey. At first, perhaps, it will endeavor to resist. It will 
have recourse to artifice and prayer. It will try to tempt us, 
XIV [ 5 ] 



OUR PAST 

to cajole. It will drag forward frustrated hopes and joys that 
are gone forever, broken affections, well-merited reproaches, 
expiring hatred and love that is dead, squandered faith and 
perished beauty; it will thrust before us all that once had been 
the marvellous essence of our ardor for life; it will point to 
the beckoning sorrows, decaying happiness, that now haunt the 
ruin. But we shall pass by without turning our head; our 
hand shall scatter the crowd of memories, even as the sage 
Ulysses, in the Cimmerian night, with his sword prevented 
the shades — even that of his mother, whom it was not his 
mission to question — from approaching the black blood that 
would for an instant have given them Hfe and speech. We 
shall go straight to the joy, the regret or remorse, whose counsel 
we need; or to the act of injustice it behooves us scrupulously 
to examine, in order either to make reparation, if such still be 
possible, or that the sight of the wrong we did, whose victims 
have ceased to be, is required to give us the indispensable 
force that shall Uft us above the injustice it still lies in us to 
commit. 

IX 

Yes, even though our past contain crimes that now are be- 
yond the reach of our best endeavors, even then, if we consider 
the circumstances of time and place and the vast plane of each 
human existence, these crimes fade out of our hfe the moment 
we feel that no temptation, no power on earth, could ever 
induce us to commit the like again. The world has not for- 
given — there is but little that the external sphere will forget 
or forgive — and their material effects will continue, for the laws 
of cause and effect are different from those which govern 
our consciousness. At the tribunal of our personal justice, 
however — the only tribunal which has decisive action on our 
inaccessible life, as it is the only one whose decrees we cannot 
evade, whose concrete judgments stir us to our very marrow — 
the evil action that we regard from a loftier plane than that 
at which it was committed, becomes an action that no longer 
exists for us save in so far as it may serve in the future to render 
our fall more difficult ; nor has it the right to lift its head again 
XIV [6] 



OUR PAST 

except at the moment when we incHne once more toward the 
abyss it guards- 
Bitter, surely, must be the grief of him in whose past there 
are acts of injustice whereof every avenue now is closed, who 
is no longer able to seek out his victims and raise them and com- 
fort them. To have abused one's strength in order to despoil 
some feeble creature who has definitely succumbed beneath the 
blow, to have callously thrust suffering upon a loving heart, 
or merely misunderstood and passed by a touching affection 
that offered itself — these things must of necessity weigh heavily 
upon our life, and induce a sorrow within us that shall not 
readily be forgotten. But it depends on the actual point our 
consciousness has attained whether our entire moral destiny 
shall be depressed or lifted beneath this burden. Our actions 
rarely die; and many unjust deeds of ours will therefore inevi- 
tably return to life some day to claim their due and start legitimate 
reprisals. They will find our external life without defence; 
but before they can reach the inward being at the centre of that 
life they must first listen to the judgment we have already 
passed on ourselves; and in accordance with the nature of 
that judgment will the attitude be of these mysterious envoys, 
who have come from the depths where cause and effect are 
established in eternal equilibrium. If it has indeed been from 
the heights of our newly acquired consciousness that we have 
questioned ourselves, and condemned, they will not be menac- 
ing justiciaries whom we shall suddenly see surging in from 
all sides, but benevolent visitors, friends we have almost ex- 
pected; and they will draw near us in silence. They know in 
advance that the man before them is no longer the guilty creature 
they sought; and instead of coming to us charged with ideas 
of hatred, revolt, and despair, with punishments that degrade 
and kill, they will flood our heart with thought and contrition 
that ennoble, purify, and console. 

X 

The manner in which we are able to recall what we have 
done or suffered is far more important than our actual suffer- 
ings or deeds. This is one of the many features — all governed 
XIV [ 7 •] 



OUR PAST 

by the amount of confidence and zeal we possess — that distin- 
guish the man who is happy and strong from him who weeps 
and will not be comforted. No past, viewed by itself, can seem 
happy; and the privileged of fate, who reflect on what remains 
of the happy years that have flown, have perhaps more reason 
for sorrow than the unfortunate ones who brood over the dregs 
of a life of wretchedness. Whatever was one day, and now is 
no longer, makes for sadness; above all, whatever was very 
happy and very beautiful. The object of our regrets — whether 
these revolve around what has been or what might have been — 
is therefore more or less the same for all men, and their sorrow 
should be the same. It is not, however; in one case it will 
reign uninterruptedly, whereas in another it will only appear 
at very long intervals. It must therefore depend on things 
other than accompHshed facts. It depends on the manner 
in which men will act on these facts. The conquerors in this 
world — those who waste no time setting up an imaginary 
irreparable and immutable athwart their horizon, those who 
seem to be born afresh every morning in the world that forever 
awakes anew to the future — these know instinctively that 
what appears to exist no longer is still existing intact, that 
what appeared to be ended is only completing itself. They 
know that the years time has taken from them are still in trav- 
ail; under their new master, obeying the old. They know 
that their past is forever in movement; that the yesterday 
which was despondent, decrepit, and criminal, will return full 
of joyousness, innocence, youth in the track of to-morrow. 
They know that their image is not yet stamped on the days 
that are gone: that a decisive deed, or thought, will suffice to 
break down the whole edifice; that however remote or vast 
the shadow may be that stretches behind them, they have only 
to put forth a gesture of gladness or hope for the shadow at 
once to copy this gesture, and, flashing it back to the remotest, 
tiniest ruins of early childhood even, to extract unexpected 
treasure from all this wreckage. They know that they have 
retrospective action on all bygone deeds; and that the dead 
themselves will annul their verdicts in order to judge afresh 
a past that to-day has transfigured and endowed with new hfe. 
XIV [ 8 J 



V 

V 



OUR PAST 

They are fortunate who find this instinct in the folds of 
their cradle. But may the others not imitate it who have it 
not ; and is not human wisdom charged to teach us how we may 
acouire the salutary instincts that nature has withheld ? 

XI 

Let us not lull ourselves to sleep in our past : and if we find 
that it tends to spread like a vault over our life, instead of 
incessantly changing beneath our eye : if the present grow into 
the habit of visiting it, not Uke a good workman repairing 
thither to execute the labors imposed upon him by the com- 
mands of to-day, but as a too passive, too credulous pilgrim 
content idly to contemplate beautiful, motionless ruins — 
then, the more glorious, the happier, that our past may have 
been, with all the more suspicion should it be regarded by us. 

Nor should we yield to the instinct that bids us accord it 
profound respect, if this respect induce the fear in us that 
we may disturb its nice equilibrium. Better the ordinary 
past, content with its befitting place in the shadow, than the 
sumptuous past which claims to govern what has travelled out 
of its reach. Better a mediocre, but living, present, which 
acts as though it were alone in the world, than a present which 
proudly expires in the chains of a marvellous long ago. A 
single step that we take at this hour toward an uncertain goal 
is far more important to us than the thousand leagues we 
covered in our march toward a dazzling triumph in the days 
that were. Our past had no other mission than to Uft us to 
the moment at which we are, and there equip us with the needful 
experience and weapons, the needful thought and gladness. 
If, at this precise moment, it take from us and divert to itself 
one particle of our energy, then, however glorious it may have 
been, it still was useless, and had better never have been. 
If we allow it to arrest a gesture that wt were about to make, 
then is our death beginning ; and the edifices of the future will 
suddenly take the semblance of tombs. 

More dangerous still than the past of happiness and glory 
is the one inhabited by overpowering and too dearly cherished 
phantoms. Many an existence perishes in the coils of a fond 
XIV [9] 



OUR PAST 

recollection. And yet, w^ the dead to return to this earth, 
they would say, I fancy, with the wisdom that must be theirs 
who have seen what the ephemeral Hght still hides from us: 
"Dry your eyes. There comes to us no comfort from your 
tears; exhausting you, they exhaust us also. Detach your- 
self from us, banish us from your thoughts, until such time as 
you can think of us without strewing tears on the life we still 
live in you. We endure only in your recollection; but you err 
in believing that your regrets alone can touch us. It is the 
things you do that prove to us we are not forgotten and rejoice 
our manes: and this without your knowing it, without any 
necessity that you should turn toward us. Each time that 
our pale image saddens your ardor, we feel ourselves die anew, 
and it is a more perceptible, irrevocable death than was our 
other; bending too often over our tombs, you rob us of the life, 
the courage and love, that you imagine you restore. 

" It is in you that we are: it is in all your life that our life 
resides; and as you become greater, even while forgetting us, 
so do we become greater too, and our shades draw the deep 
breath ot prisoners whose prison door is flung open. 

"If there be anything new we have learned in the world 
where we are, it is, first of all, that the good we did to you when 
we were, like yourselves, on the earth, does not balance the 
evil wrought by a memory which saps the force and the con- 
fidence of hfe." 

XII 

Above all, let us envy the past of no man. Our own past 
was created by ourselves, and for ourselves alone. No other 
could have suited us, no other could have taught us the truth 
that it alone can teach, or given the strength that it alone can 
give. And whether it be good or bad, sombre or radiant, it 
still remains a collection of unique masterpieces the value of 
which is known to none but ourselves; and no foreign master- 
piece could equal the action we have accomphshed, the kiss 
we received, the thing of beauty that moved us so deeply, the 
suffering we underwent, the anguish that held us enchained, 
the love that wreathed us in smiles or in tears. Our past is 
XIV [ lO ] 



OUR PAST 

ourselves, what we are and shall be; and upon this unknown 
sphere there moves no creature, from the happiest down to 
the most unfortunate, who could foretell how great a loss would 
be his could he substitute the trace of another for the trace 
which he himself must leave in life. Our past is our secret 
promulgated by the voice of years: it is the most mysterious 
image of our being, over which Time keeps watch. The image 
is not dead: a mere nothing degrades or adorns it: it can still 
grow bright or sombre, can still smile or weep, express love or 
hatred; and yet it remains recognizable forever in the midst 
of the myriad images that surround it. It stands for what we 
once were, as our aspirations and hopes stand for what we 
shall be; and the two faces blend that they may teach us what 
we are. 

Let us not envy the facts of the past, but rather the spiritual 
garment that the recollection of days long gone will weave 
around the sage. And though this garment be woven of joy 
or of sorrow, though it be drawn from the dearth of events or 
from their abundance, it shall still be equally precious; and 
those who may see it shining over a life shall not be able to 
tell whether its quickening jewels and stars were found amid 
the grudging cinders of a cabin or upon the steps of a palace. 

No past can be empty or squalid, no events can be wretched ; 
the wretchedness lies in our manner of welcoming them. And 
if it were true that nothing had happened to you, that would 
be the most astounding adventure that any man ever had met 
with; and no less remarkable would be the Hght it would shed 
upon you. In reality the facts, the opportunities and possi- 
bilities, the passions, that await and invite the majority of men, 
are all more or less the same. Some may be more dazzling 
than others; their attendant circumstances may differ, but 
they differ far less than the inward reactions that follow ; and 
the insignificant, incomplete event that falls on a fertile heart 
and brain will readily attain the moral proportions and grandeur 
of an analogous incident which, on another plane, will con- 
vulse a whole people. 

He who should see, spread out before him, the past lives 
of a multitude of men, could not easily decide which past he 
XIV [ 1 1 ] 



OUR PAST 

himself would wish to ha-\^nivcd, were he not able at the same 
time to witness the moral results of these dissimilar and un- 
symmctrical facts. He might not impossibly make a fatal 
blunder: he might choose an existence overflowing with in- 
comparable happiness and victory, that sparkle hke wonderful 
jewels; while his glance might travel indifferently over a hfe 
that appeared to be empty, whereas it was truly steeped to the 
brim in serene emotions and lofty, redeeming thoughts, where- 
by, though the eye saw nothing, that life was yet rendered 
happy among all. For we are well aware that what destiny 
has given and what destiny holds in reserve can be revolu- 
tionized as utterly by thought as by great victory or great defeat. 
Thought is silent: it disturbs not a pebble on the illusory road 
we see; but at the crossway of the more actual road that our 
secret hfe follows will it tranquilly erect an indestructible pyra- 
mid; and thereupon, suddenly, every event, to the very phenom- 
ena of Earth and Heaven, will assume a new direction. 

In Siegfried's life it is not the moment when he forges the 
prodigious sword that he is most important, or when he kills 
the dragon and compels the gods from his path, or even the 
dazzling second when he encounters love on the flaming moun- 
tain; but indeed the brief instant wrested from eternal decrees, 
the little childish gesture when one of his hands, red with the 
blood of his mysterious victim, having chanced to draw near 
his lips, his eyes and ears are suddenly opened : he understands 
the hidden language of all that surrounds him, detects the 
treachery of the dwarf who represents the powers of evil, and 
learns in a flash to do that which had to be done. 



XIV [ 12 ] 



XV 



ART 

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART"* 

BY 

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 



T F art might he dismissed as a mere means of amusement, a 
-* source of relaxation to be the sport of leisure hours, it 
would have no place in our discussion here. But art, as the 
great artists have understood it, as the world is beginning to 
understand it, is not a pleasant playing with colors or with 
sounds or words; it is an effort to give the highest, truest ex- 
pression to whatever is pure and fair ivithin us. Looked at in 
this light, art becomes assuredly one of the important aspects 
of life. The one all-important aspect, it has seemed to some 
geniuses, a Beethoven, or a Michelangelo! And though most 
of us may refuse to go so far in our artistic devotion, yet it is 
evident that in seeking to understand modern life we must pause 
for a moment to examine into the meaning of art, its aims and 
hopes, and its relationship to life in general. It is this study 
which is here essayed by Mr. Howells, William Dean Howells, 
who has been aptly termed the dean of American letters, whose 
novels and whose critical works have won him the respect and 
admiration of all readers. The following essay, previously pub- 
lished by Messrs. Harper ^ Brothers in their volume ^^Litera- 
ture and Life,^^ is here reproduced by consent of the publishers 
and with the special permission of Mr. Howells. It is accom- 
panied by an address from M. de Maulde, the well-known French 
critic, in which he discusses the use of art in daily and especially 
in feminine life, the aims and means of art and woman being 
made clear as a Frenchman sees them. 

^ Copyright 1902 by Harper & Brothers. 
XV [l] 



ART 

One of the things ^ways enforcing itself upon the 
consciousness of the artist in any sort is the fact that 
those whom artists work for rarely care for their work 
artistically. They care for it morally, personally, partially. 
I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled preference 
.for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a 
philistine question of the material when it should, aesthetically 
speaking, be concerned solely with the form. 



The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and 
amusing illustration of my point. They were playing a most 
soul-filling melodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance 
from the very first that there will be no trouble in the end, but 
everything will come out just as it should,, no matter what 
obstacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. An 
overruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigencies of 
the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment 
in behalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never 
had the least occasion for anxiety. Not unnaturally there was 
a black-hearted villain in the piece; so vcr^' black-hearted that 
he seemed not to have a single good impulse from first to last. 
Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage Providence, as harmless 
as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly aims. He accom- 
plished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intents had been 
of the best ; except for the satisfaction afforded by the edifying 
spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been, in, 
the play at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, 
he was so continually baffled. But this was not enough for the 
audience, or for that part of it which filled the gallery to the 
roof. Perhaps he was such an uncommonly black-hearted vil- 
lain, so very, very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the justice 
unsparingly dealt out to him by the dramatist could not suffice. 
At any rate, the gallery took such a vivid interest in his punish- 
ment that it had out the actor who impersonated the wretch 
between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate 
passage across the stage before the curtain. The hisses were 

XV [ 2 ] 



ART 

not at all for the actor, but altogether for the character. The 
performance was fairly good, quite as good as the performance 
of any virtuous part in the piece, and easily up to the level of 
other villanous performances (I never find much nature in them, 
perhaps because there is not much nature in villany itself; 
that is, villany pure and simple); but the mere conception of 
the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much 
for an audience of the average popular goodness. It was only 
after he had taken poison, and fallen dead before their 
eyes, that the spectators forbore to visit him with a lively proof 
of their abhorrence; apparently they did not care to "give 
him a realizing sense that there was a punishment after death, " 
as the man in Lincoln's story did with the dead dog. 

II 

The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since 
put me upon thinking (I hke to be put upon thinking; the 
eighteenth-century essayists were) that the attitude of the audi- 
ence towards this deplorable reprobate is really the attitude 
of most readers of books, lookers at pictures and statues, 
listeners to music, and so on through the whole list of the arts. 
It is absolutely different from the artist's attitude, from the 
connoisseur's attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their 
attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist 
works for. Art is not produced for artists, or even for con- 
noisseurs; it is produced for the general, who can never view 
it otherwise than morally, personally, partially, from their 
associations and preconceptions. 

Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works 
for or not, he does not succeed without it. Their brute liking 
or misliking is the final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, 
after all. Only, in some cases of this sort, the polls do not 
close at four o'clock on the first Tuesday after the first Monday 
of November, but remain open forever, and the voting goes 
on. Still, even the first day's canvass is important, or at least 
significant. It will not do for the artist to electioneer, but if he 
is beaten he ought to ponder the causes of his defeat, and 
XV [3] 



ART 

question how he has failc^ffo touch the chord of universal in- 
terest. He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to 
his fellow -men, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant 
of both, but whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. 
If he can make something that they will cheer, or something 
that they will hiss, he may not have done any great thing, 
but if he has made something that they will neither cheer nor 
hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter how well, 
how finely, how truly he has done the thing. 

This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one's artist-pride 
such as one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. 
Not long ago I was talking about pictures with a painter, a very 
great painter, to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the 
same feeling I have from reading poetry; and I was excusing 
myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps putting on a little 
more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoy pictures 
only on the literary side, and could get no answer from 
my soul to those excellences of handling and execution which 
seemed chiefly to interest painters. He replied that it was a 
confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed merely or 
mainly to technical knowledge in the spectator; that he nar- 
rowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that if he painted 
for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he 
was denying his office, which was to say something clear and 
appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even 
Insisted that a picture ought to tell a story. 

The difficulty in humbling one's self to this view of art 
is in the ease with which one may please the general by art 
which is no art. Neither the play nor the playing that I saw 
at the theatre when the actor was hissed for the wickedness 
of the villain he was personating was at all fine; and yet I 
perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a supreme 
effect. If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be 
very sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very 
proud if, on the level I chose and with the quality I cared for, 
I could invent a villain that the populace would have out and 
hiss for his surpassing wickedness. In other words, I think 
it a thousand pities whenever an artist gets so far away from the 
XV [4] 



ART 

general, so far within himself or a little circle of amateurs, 
that his highest and best work awakens no response in the 
multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger of the arts 
among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain. It makes 
one sick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the 
common people is won. It is not an infallible test of merit, 
but if it is wanting to any performance, we may be pretty sure 
it is not the greatest performance. 

Ill 

The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human 
affairs, to confound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in 
that. We talk, for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly 
imagine that this is different from talking of cooker)- for cooks. 
Poetry is not made for poets; they have enough poetry of their 
own, but it is made for people who are not poets. If it 
does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is poetry 
which has failed of its truest office. It is none the less its 
truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to 
do it. 

The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to 
achieve this truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but 
that he should study how and where and why the beauty and 
the truth he has made manifest are wanting in universal interest, 
in human appeal. Leaving the drama out of the question, 
and the theatre, which seems now to be seeking only the favor 
of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a race 
more open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than 
ours. The artist who feels their divine charm, and longs to 
impart it, has now and here a chance to impart it more widely 
than ever artist had in the world before. Of course, the means 
of reaching the widest range of humanity are the simple and 
the elementary, but there is no telling when the complex and 
the recondite may not universally please. The art is to 
make them plain to every one, for every one has them in him. 
Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters 
a foot high. 

XV [5] 



ART 

The painter, sculptor,^R- author who pleases the poHte 
only has a success to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be 
ashamed of that it goes no further. He need not shrink from 
giving pleasure to the vulgar because bad art pleases them. 
It is part of his reason for being that he should please them, 
too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is M^anting in force, 
however much he abounds in fineness. Who would not wish 
his picture to draw a crowd about it? Who would not wish 
his novel to sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons 
besides the sordid love of gain which I am told governs novel- 
ists ? One should not really wish it any the less because 
chromos and historical romances are popular. 

Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw 
nearer together in a mutual understanding, though perhaps 
not in our present conditions. I put that understanding 
off till the good time when life shall be more than living, 
more even than the question of getting a living; but in the mean 
time I think that the artist might very well study the springs 
of feeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should 
quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for 
his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had been made 
so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not being a dramatist, 
I still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of that play and its 
public. 



ART IN DAILY LIFE 

BY 

R. DE MAULDE 

Many people think that life cannot be filled better than by 
whirl and excitement. Tell me frankly, does this lend charm 
to life? Life is what it is; why should we kill ourselves in 
painting its stucco? It would often be doing us a service 
were some one to show us the ridiculous side of a crowd of 
obligations and ambitions in which we consume ourselves, 
vainly. To do this thing or that because "ever)'body does it," 
XV [6] 



ART 

to know everybody, to take the present time by the forelock, 
to think eveiybody's thoughts, to see what every one sees, to 
eat the fashionable kickshaws and suffer from the fashionable 
complaint, to reel under the prodigious exertion of doing 
nothing — truly a fine object in life, ' this : the life of a circus 
horse or a squirrel. The world will regard us with admiration 
maybe; but the physician before whom we presently collapse 
after our surfeit will treat us as degenerates. 

He will tell us to quit Paris and fly to the sea or the moun- 
tains. Stuff! 'tis not the air of Paris that is unwholesome; 
what is unwholesome is its moral atmosphere. Still, I do 
find it a little hard to understand how a Parisian, constantly 
beset by risks so various, can reach manhood limb-whole, 
unmaimed. To be alive — that is the marvel. 

And many persons, amid these futile activities, pass life 
by after all without touching it. Who they were is never known ; 
you see only their gestures. In sooth, there must be many 
serious people among the clowns at the fair, judging by the 
number of clowns and fribbles among serious people. 

Not a few of the grave men I happen to meet, lawyers, 
bankers, men of business, are not really men at all; they are 
merely lawyers, bankers, men of business. Is this happiness! 

Mr. Rockefeller, the petroleum king, has fallen into a melan- 
choly. Like Charles V., he desires to abdicate; but this 
dream is still to him a fresh source of trouble and sorrow, for 
he seeks a mortal of fit mould and temper to wield the sceptre 
in his stead, and, though he scours two hemispheres, this 
mortal is nowhere discoverable. 

Will it astonish you, Madam, if I avouch that this rage 
of unrest has set its mark upon some of your sex? Would 
not you yourself think it a slight on your reputation if you 
were even suspected of being a stay-at-home ? Conversation — 
writing, — what outworn, antiquated things! You fling out 
your words, your notes, in the style of a tradesman's list or 
a telegram; you are seen in the paddock or the polo-field, on 
charitable committees, in presidential chairs; since man is 
master, you think you are winning a place among the engulf- 
ing sex by adopting mannish modes wholesale. 
XV [7] 



ART 

The most charming of4Pbmcn will cut, at least, but a poor 
figure as a man; and I cannot, in truth, see what there is in 
the spectacle of the masculine hurly-burly to attract women 
who might well live in quietness. To be endlessly getting 
and spending, to turn all things to laughter and take nothing 
seriously, to be altogether insensible — oh, a fine philosophy! 
With all his wealth and titles and decorations, many a man 
comes to crawling on all-fours, and even finds exceeding com- 
fort in his proncness, like the good soul who, being changed into 
a swine by the enchantress Circe, refused point-blank to resume 
his former features. But all our restless strivings represent 
in reality nothing but a varnish of egotism, wherefore we cannot 
desire a woman to take pleasure in them. Moreover, she 
would have to force her nature to attain an egotism so perfect. 
Such egotism is very rare among you, ladies; and often, after 
the loss of those you love has driven you within your last 
entrenchments, it' happens that Death comes, rather than 
Forgetfulness. 

Shall we at least find joy in the happiness of doing nothing ? 

I recognize that, for some women, there is a measure of 
practical wisdom in remaining idle. Unaccustomed to any- 
thing that can be called work, constrained often to periods 
of enforced idleness, they prefer to avoid all serious under- 
takings, last their activity prove mere bungling. 

This attitude of mind is familiar also to many men, if they 
have an income however small, or merely the hope of espousing 
one. They tell themselves that work brings worry, breeds 
jealousy and envy: ignorance has its art — the art of shining 
inexpensively; and all you have to do for the decoration you 
covet is to unveil a statue in honor of some philosopher con- 
neviently deceased. Meanwhile, it is so pleasant a sensation, 
so conducive to the peace and order of your country, to 
smoke your cigar without one thought, one desire, one 
aspiration ! 

So pleasant ! But stay, my dear sir, let me deal fairly with 

you: you are always doing something, even though it be only 

smoking, hunting, reading the newspaper, emitting your 

political views, riding, eating, digesting. Only, these occu- 

XV [ S ] 



ART 

pations are useless to your neighbors. It is very lucky, you 
will admit, that all men do not profess the same principles 
of ideal parasitism, for then who would give you to eat ? 

If we could but hug the assurance that wretchedness be- 
longs of right to the poor, and glory to the rich, we might be- 
seech the poor to batten on the odors exhaled from your kitchens. 
But no ; uselessness seeks to foist itself as a mark of distinction ; 
and vanity, often more ravenous than hunger, excites violent 
social strictures, especially among workmen of some intelli- 
gence, and sufficiently well off already to have an inkling 
of what luxury means. 

Unhappily, our progress in material things serves only to 
develop this sense of luxury, by establishing on all sides con- 
tacts purely material. Money, and money alone, classifies 
the passengers on the railway; we all become mere parcels, 
some in wadding, others not. We are estimated by the weight 
of our money, though that is commonly a cause of moral feeble- 
ness, or at least of torpor. Will social happiness, any more 
than personal happiness, be found in this glorification of ma- 
terial indolence and the aristocracy of pleasure ? It seems not, 
judging by the jealousy that devours our whole society, from 
top to bottom. There is endless talk of solidarity, fraternity; 
that is the court dress of the present day, as were formerly wigs 
and knee-breeches. But never was egotism so intolerant; 
never, consequently, was the tedium of life so grievous. 

Men mightily deceive themselves by indulging all their 
life long the dream of an easy time — retirement from business, 
quiet days of fishing, and so on; seeking a path to this happi- 
ness by way of a life of inelastic limitations. Our life is either 
whirl or stagnation. To the women who do nothing, as well 
as to all these mechanical gentlemen, to those who are enam- 
oured of the world, and to persons flourishing and waxing fat, 
may I present the woman of my dreams? She has formed 
the habit of living so actively on the joys and sorrows of others, 
she has sustained, encouraged, helped others so often, shared 
so many fears and hopes, seen so much of birth and death, 
lived so full of life, that beneath her blanching hair her heart 
finds it impossible to retire from the service. It grows and 
XV [9] 



grows. Her activity, alwUP fruitful, brings forth ever more 
and more. A clear proof that there must be a special secret. 

II 

Art has for its aim perfection, the augmentation of our sen- 
sibility to physical objects. Contact with the True and the Use- 
ful being often void of charm, whether because the Beautiful 
passes " out of range," as hunters say, or because the ugly presses 
upon us somew'hat too closely, art consists in creating for 
one's self a nest, a little sanctuary, an environment that one can 
love, and in presenting to us by their softer sides the things 
with which contact is inevitable. 

Therefore a woman's art consists in drawing from the most 
modest occupations a ray of beauty and of love ; and the surest 
means of discovering such in those is to put it there. 

A gross error of our time is an aesthetic error. The belief 
is current that there are things which are necessarily artistic, 
■which make you an artist from head to heel as soon as you 
touch them, and other things which can never be artistic. People 
rush to the first, and eschew the others. They fancy themselves 
to be artists by the mere fact of their handling a chisel or a 
brush instead of a plough; a governess, be she ever such a 
goose, thinks herself a superior person. In reality there are 
some things to which art is applied, and other things to which 
it is not applied. The art of life consists in living steadily, 
without perturbations, in doing honestly that for which we 
were born, and in doing it with love. 

I cannot forget, for example, the singular impression pro- 
duced upon me, in a corner of the old hospital of Bruges, 
where Memlinc worked, by a group of Beguines scraping car- 
rots, and murmuring their prayers the while. I was leaving 
the place with a band of tourists, my eyes filled with beauty, 
my heart haunted by the exquisite visions of Memlinc; these 
placid women, not one of whom raised her head at so com- 
monplace an event as a stranger passing, wholly absorbed, 
as they were, in blending the love of God with the fulfilment 
of His laws, well reflected the sentiment of the painter, the 
XV [to] 



ART 

living ray of grace. I seemed to see around them a glamour 
of art. 

Take a woman who, from an entirely different point of view, 
showed the same instinct for finding loveliness in common 
things — the celebrated Madame Roland. 

"The drying of her grapes and plums, the garnering of her 
nuts and apples, the due preparation of her dried pears, her 
broods of hens, her litters of rabbits, her frothing lye, the 
mending of her linen, the ranging of her napery in its lofty 
presses — all these were objects of her personal, unstinted, 
unremitting care, and gave her pleasure. She was present at 
the village merrymakings and took her place among the dancers 
on the green. The country people from miles around sought 
her aid for sick friends whom the doctors had given up. She 
ranged the fields on foot and horseback to collect simples, 
to enrich her herbarium, to complete her collections, and would 
pause in delight before tufts of violets bordering the hedgerows 
bursting with the first buds of spring, or before the ruddy 
vine-clusters tremulous in the autumn breeze; for her, every- 
thing in meadow and wood had voices, everything a smile." ^ 

When a woman has armed herself with this special force 
of beauty, she has done much. It only remains for her to nour- 
ish and propagate it ; her life is a permanent work of art ; around 
her an atmosphere is naturally created in which all things 
solicit and give play to our noblest sentiments. Ah! this art 
is no chimera, no vain or useless thing ; it is the very nursery of 
life. Even in a cottage it smiles upon the wayfarer, offering 
flowers to his view, teaching him the graciousness and the 
necessity of joy. M. Guyau defines the artist as "he who, 
simple even in his profound accomplishment, preserves in the 
gaze of the world a certain freshness of heart, and (so to say) 
a perpetual novelty of sensation." That is the impression 
that a woman should produce around her, and no tremendous 
exertion is needed, since the first rule is frankness and sim- 
plicity. Luxury tends to be hurtful. It is useless to go far 
afield, to ferret out recondite styles, to complicate, to love 
the affected, the rare, the eccentric, the languid. Let the house 

>0. Gr^ard. 
XV [ 1 1 ] 



ART 

be a living and well-ordered place, where the accessory does 
not take precedence of the essential, where every object has 
its own place and its specific character. Breathe into all things 
a sentiment of unity, and also, as far as possible, of spaciousness 
and comfort. 

In the country, respect the ancient dwelling, even though 
a little dilapidated — the old walls, the old furniture, the old 
avenue, the old church. Tiy to feel in presence of a living 
personality. A house is a book in stone, and, if you will, you 
may give to everything a soul, even to stones. Allow your own 
life freely to enter and pervade this ancient home. Irregular- 
ities in structure, recent additions, are all cries of existence. 
Something of your own soul thus cleaves to all these walls. 
Is it not true that the architect of a building, the painter of 
a fresco, the carver of an arabesque, have left upon their work 
some fragments of their souls? Their thoughts hover about 
the walls. The voice of a singer causes the composer's soul 
to live again in us; the painter, the sculptor, speak to us, serve 
us as mentors. I also, in these pages, shall leave some frag- 
ments of my soul, with the hope that in the shadow of my 
thought some one perchance may pray and love. 

Ill 

Rich or poor, do not crowd your walls ; set on them merely 
a living and friendly note, something that is a final revelation 
of yourself, an element of life — a pretty water-color, a fine 
engraving. Is not this a thousand times better than a vulgar 
glitter, or even than tapestries? It is you, your thought, 
that you must stamp on these walls! Thereby you extend 
and fortify your personal action. What recks it me whether 
I find this or that object in your drawing-room? Am I stepping 
into a photographer's studio, or into a museum? It is you 
that I want to see. And, to tell the truth, I do not think it 
very delightful to see above your head your own portrait, 
the portraits of your husband and children. The end of por- 
traiture is to replace the absent ; besides, the painter or engraver 
strikes me too forcibly as interposing between you and me, 
XV • [ 12 ] 



ART 

and as indicating almost brutally how I am to understand 
you. What would happen, I wonder, if I should admire the 
imitation more than the original? 

I would rather divine you, come to know you, in my own 
fashion, as the secret unity among your belongings grows upon 
me. If the visitor on entering perceives no discordant element; 
if his eye, wandering presently towards the chimney-piece or 
some other salient point, rests on a beautiful head enhaloed, 
as it were, with Christian sentiment and ideals, or on a beautiful 
Greek statue, calm, dignified, in no wise labored or strained, 
natural in pose and expression; at once he is at ease, his con- 
fidence is already won. 

Presently his glance will range afield ; he will perceive some 
fine early Italian master, adorable in its artlessness, crowded 
with ardent ideas, and fragrant with noble aspirations; or 
if you are touched with the unrest of life, if needs you must 
plumb the mysterious and the unknown, you will have made 
room for some Vincian vision; or maybe for the clever and 
superficial gayeties of the French school, or the admirable 
warmth and freedom of some of our landscape painters. 

Many people indulge a taste for small canvases, because 
these will hang anywhere, go with anything, form part of the 
furniture, and suggest no manner of problem — cowsheds to 
wit, scoured miraculously clean, interiors all spick and span, 
kettles athrob, alive; or watery meadow-lands, with gray trees 
and gray water, and clouds fretted, or far stretched-out, or 
close-packed, or fiocculent. These do not tire the brain, they 
offend no one, except that, from the house-decorator's point 
of view, they are often of too superior a workmanship. 

Rembrandt is the divinity of shade, the antipodes of the 
Italian expansiveness. In an impenetrable cloud he dints a 
spot of gold, which proves to be a drunkard, a beggar, a melan- 
choly wight, a rotund Boniface, a needy soul, or a Jew from 
Amsterdam or Batignolles; or possibly himself. 

There are also the Gargantuesque old Flemish masters, 
with their phenomenal processions, their banquets open to 
the world, bubbling over with gayety and life. 

It seems to me that in matters of art one should say Raca I 
^v [ 13 ] 



ART 

to nothing; every aesthetiffmprcssion has some use. And 
I really do not see the utility of a dispute like that which has 
been wrangled over for ages, about the relative importance 
of form and substance. Certainly there are features that are 
accidental, and others that arc essential; you will choose 
according to your taste. The arts of design have no title to gov- 
ern your soul; it is your part to govern and make use of them. 
Do you prefer to invoke an image, or a thought ? Do you wish 
to surround yourself with the brutalities of so-called Truth, 
or with suggestions, forms which efface themselves in the 
interests of impressions or ideas ? Do you love beauty of form, 
exact outlines, well-defined contours, or a broad effect, a surface 
whose lines are lost in the ambient shade? These are ques- 
tions for yourself to answer. Good tools are those which suit 
you best. It is not the mission of painter or sculptor to re- 
produce a scene with mathematical precision; a photographer 
would do this better; the artist's part is to be of service to you, 
to furnish you with the elements of the art of life. Indeed, 
it is the distinguishing mark of the artist that he singles out 
and segregates, in a crowd, in a landscape, the one choice ob- 
ject ; upon this he fastens, he is alive to all its manifold nuances, 
and the charm is so great that around this object he sees nought 
but gloom. 

The aesthetic object does you the delightful service of 
supplementing your own visions, and of compassing you about 
with ideas. You do not inquire what it is, but what it expresses ; 
the cleverest of still-life pictures, like those to be seen in Italian 
houses, would give you but a very superficial pleasure. You 
need support, not illusions; this marble, as no one knows 
better than yourself, is marble; but it speaks to you. 

Only, the message of art needs to be properly directed. To 
catch its accents, or to make them heard, one must impart 
to it something of one's own. How wonderfully the meaning 
of things, even their most precise intellectual meaning, varies 
for us, day by day, through distraction or a change of mood! 
If our mind wanders when we read a book, the loveliest thoughts 
glide over us as though over marble. A lady who had been 
stirred to enthusiasm by a somewhat mediocre book wrote 
XV [ 14 ] 



ART 

asking me to recommend another Vv^hich would produce the 
same effect. I told her first to fill herself with the same en- 
thusiasm, and then to take down from her shelves any book 
she pleased. One day, subdued to our mechanism, we pass 
on like blind men; the next, if our hearts are moved and our 
spirits satisfied, we feel suggestion to the full, and go so far as 
to see, in a phrase or a picture, ideas which the author never 
dreamed of putting there. 

Let us not, then, be anxious to crowd our rooms with beau- 
tiful things; far better to display things few in number, but 
high in worth, adapted to their surroundings, and performing 
in some sort the office of the conductor of an orchestra. 

To enforce this reflection, it is enough to mention the 
irritating effect produced by certain museums. The genus 
"collection" — that is the rock to shun! All these hapless 
canvases, torn from their luminous, hallowed, intimate, unique 
places, are there exhibited high and dry in philosophic deso- 
lation, rootless, forlorn. At ten o'clock you have to don the 
freshness of spirit necessary to enjoy them, and doff it on the 
stroke of four or five, according to the season. Instead of en- 
tering a gallery with heart at rest, and seeing in the sanctuary 
the objects of worship, you pull it to pieces, compare it with 
the canons, and puzzle out a needless meaning. Some good 
souls criticise the subject, others its treatment and technique; 
and the keepers stroll about or doze in a corner. What a 
crime to despoil streets and palaces and churches, the very 
tombs, for the sake of ranging such labels in a row! This is 
art as officialdom knows it. 

In a room of great simplicity, a single work, adapted to 
its surroundings, and excellently interpreting a woman's 
tastes, renders us a wholly different service. This is no corpse 
to anatomize. You contemplate a thing that is loved, and 
a radiance floods the place; you forget, if only for a moment, 
the offences of life. And I maintain that the poorest woman 
in the world, if she has confidence in beauty, will always be 
able thus to fill her home with light; she can always place in It 
some flowers or a photograph. 

XV [15] 



ART 



IV 



You may furnish your rooms in a higher sort by adorning 
your chairs with beings who speak and act. In referring to 
these famib'ar beings as furniture I mean no harm, but simply 
imply that they are no friends of yours, but merely accessories, 
persons who sink their own ideas and tastes. Madam, to assist 
your art with theirs. 

In this category, musicians probably hold the first place. 
Indeed, music plays a much higher role in aestheticism than 
the manual arts, a role scarcely inferior to that of the intellectual 
arts. Like the latter, it has (so to say) no substance, appealing 
solely to the feelings; whether we will or no, it rarely fails to 
take possession of us, though merely by tangled sensations ; it 
catches us as in a web, and does with us what it will ; it moves 
as, lulls us to sleep, stimulates us. It derives its effects from the 
relations of tone, whether with neighboring tones on the scale, 
or with the singer and the listener. A small thing in itself, 
it is yet of capital importance; all life, all motion even, pro- 
duces sound, from the wind and the sea upwards; and re- 
course has ever been had to sound for the purpose of touching 
men. 

Beggars and the blind have always sung, as they do to this 
day; song has ever been employed to console the afflicted, to 
hearten soldiers on the march, even to soothe physical pain. 

With very good reason, then, do women regard music as 
their own peculiar sphere. Thus, at the epoch of the Renais- 
sance, in the heyday of their influence, they adopted musical 
attributes in their portraits; these were, so to speak, their 
sceptres. 

Does it beseem a woman to aim higher, and to seek to create 
around her a real atmosphere of philosophy, history, science, 
poetry — in short, an intellectual atmosphere? Yes, and no. 
If she is so reliant on her own wit and ascendancy as to make 
all the personages she gathers but garniture for her soul or faith- 
ful radiators of her glory, mere apostles of her influence, yes. 
But no, if she has any fear of being absorbed by her surroundings 
and reduced to the level of a landlady. 
XV [ i6 ] 



ART 

It is often said that salons are things of the past, and the 
fact is lamented; in truth there are no salons now, and there 
never will be again, because, what with the ambitions and pre- 
tensions of men, the necessities of their careers, the obligations 
of the struggle for life, the present age knows little of the delight 
of allowing itself to be embodied or summed up in a woman. 
A drawing-room very soon becomes a sort of exchange for 
literary or sporting affairs, or the like. This does not imply 
that, for their own purposes, women should neglect intellectual 
resources; but it will certainly be recognized that real courage 
is needed if they are to rise superior to tittle-tattle, talk of 
stocks or the stable, the stuff they read, the things they hear. 
Happy are the societies where one can still enjoy life, and 
think! Happy the man who, like Monsieur Jourdain, makes 
prose without knowing it! 

Yet, without holding a salon, women may still exercise in 
intellectual matters a guiding influence truly indispensable. 
Instead of allowing themselves to fall a prey to puffery, clap- 
trap, or scandal, why should they not, on the contrary, treat 
as personal enemies the men who only use their undoubted 
talents to sport with them, to flaunt everywhere their nudities, 
to show off the slaves of their pleasure? — why smile upon 
scribblers, geniuses of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter? 
It is self-constituted slavery to bow incessantly at the feet of 
fashion. Always the fashion! A play is bad. Don't go to 
see it, and tell people so. A poem is a medley of unintelligible 
catchwords, a rigmarole of sonorous nothings ; have the courage 
to say that it defies comprehension and that your mind loves 
lucidity! We all need our courage: this is yours. Nobody 
wants you to shoulder a rifle; you are asked to read or not 
to read, to see or not to see. If need be, effect a grand spring- 
cleaning! You alone can destroy the literature of the music- 
hall and the casino, the trashy novelettes, that ravage the mean- 
est hamlets worse than alcohol. Is this courage beyond your 
strength? Do you fancy yourself compelled, because it is 
a free country, to fuddle yourself on the vile rinsings retailed 
a few steps away from your dwelling? Why then do you 
nourish your spirit on things that no one would dare to retail 
XV [ 17 ] 



ART 

in the open air ? Nobody ^uld suggest that you should pass 
your life in preaching; a light or even a fatuous remark is not 
likely to offend. But for pity's sake insist that people wash 
their hands before entering your doors. Many a great person- 
age whom you invite to dinner and make much of would be 
wearing a livery and displaying his calves in your entrance- 
hall if he had remained an honest man. Dare to face and 
to praise things that are true and serious. Diffuse their fra- 
grance around you. You are responsible for the books that 
lie about on your table. 

What a power you would have at command if you acted 
resolutely in the interests of beauty! The whole world would 
lay down its arms at your feet. The sentiment of the Beauti- 
ful is so strong! "To fathom the dreams of poets is the true 
philosophy," said a philosopher. "The mind of the savant 
stops at phenomena ; the soul of the poet essays a higher flight, 
his inward vision pierces to the heart of reality. If the final 
knowledge is that which attains, not the surface, but the founda- 
tions of being, the poet's method is the true one." 

Wherefore, surround yourself at any rate with men who have 
the taste for rendering life musical; in your conversations 
encourage clear, clean, warm images, refinements of sentiment 
rather than tricks of style; spread abroad an air of gayety, 
polish, and, above all, reverence. Your door is not that of a 
church, but neither is it that of a market. 

Some v/omen have too much belief in men of distinction, 
or so reputed; they imagine them upon a higher plane than 
they really are, and, especially, more difficult to reach. The 
majority of them, foolish or eminent, obscure or famous, reck 
little of grand sentiments, and are satisfied with a modicum 
of illusion or suggestion; they are led by means quite infantile, 
provided they are carried out of themselves. 

Have you sometimes pondered our extraordinary facility 
for self-detachment, whenever we perform an act of imagination 
— ^if we are reading a novel, for instance? We delight in be- 
ing duped ; we want to see and hear everything, we fancy our- 
selves present at scenes where the novelist himself declares 
no one was present. Thus, as has been said by a very witty 
XV [ i8 ] 



ART 

writer, we identify ourselves so thoroughly vs^ith the adventures 
of Pierre Loti that on the day when the Academy received 
into its bosom M. Julien Viaud, naval officer, the whole assem- 
bly, though so fastidiously select, thought they were really 
beholding M. Loti. 

The art of the novelist consists in riveting us to what he 
depicts. M. Loti, for instance, to whom I have just referred, 
has admirably painted the sea, but he has not sought to exalt 
it to a level with us; he has lent to it neither ideas nor will, 
sadness nor ecstasies; but he has marvellously felt and caused 
us to feel the solemnity of its multitudinous and changeless life, 
its invincible weight, its aimless perturbation, and it is in this 
way that he has so powerfully impressed us. 

Well, your art is similar. You need not trouble about your 
merits or ours, but solely about the effect you can produce 
on us who love to be duped. Acknowledge this as a guiding 
principle; for it is easier to regulate illusions than realities. 

Finally, we must clearly envisage the precise duty of women, 
which is to develop their natural gifts, and boldly to adopt 
the virtues in which men are lacking. 

They are the instrument of life, one might almost say 
the magic cauldron of life. They set all its elements in fer- 
mentation. To transform and to impart is their whole concern. 
Scarcely have they opened their eyes upon the world but they 
must needs have a doll to cherish, and tend, and fondle. And 
they continue thus cherishing, tending, fondling, unless life 
warps their nature. "Their machinery," as Rousseau said, 
"is admirable for assuaging or exciting the passions." Theirs 
is a treasure that grows richer in the spending. Even from 
a physiological point of view, they exhibit a marvellous power 
of endurance. They are not armed for attack; the finest 
natured are the strongest; their chords answer wonderfully 
to all appeals of sentiment; they love money with resignation, 
but glory intoxicates them; they live on a glance, a breath 
of kindness; their enthusiasm is contagious, and they shed 
around them the youth and freshness of life. So, without 
intention or effort, they are constantly bestowing their very 
selves, they clothe all things with their own enthusiasm. Science 
XV [19] 



ART 

they vindicate by the noble Wits they obtain from it; from thorns 
they cause roses to spring forth, and these roses in their turn 
they cultivate, giving them an added beauty and fragrance, 
and fresh blossoms all the season round. Excellent gardeners 
of the world ! Their role no doubt has varied with the circum- 
stances and needs of different times ; but the urgent necessities 
of the present time serve only to accentuate it and bring it into 
higher relief. The ignorance and weakness of women work 
more real mischief than the ignorance and weakness of men. 
The passive virtues no longer avail for governing; active virtues 
are the need of to-day. 

In olden days, if men loved the king, it was because he 
belonged to them all, and represented something indispensable 
to every society, a person with no private interests, but wholly 
devoted to the interest of the public. Furthermore, he had 
no possessions entirely his own, not even a park, not even his 
palace. Now, daring as the idea may appear, let us say that 
women also can only reign on condition of communizing their 
souls. Otherwise, they will lose all influence, even with their 
sons. A woman comes short of essential duties if she stops 
at bemoaning the evils of the times and playing patroness to 
good little schoolboys, instead of learning for herself and re- 
vealing to others what the evils of the times really are, of draw- 
ing out the manhood slumbering within us, and giving it new 
graces. She bears the burden of human joy. And a woman 
of intelligence and leisure has, in this particular, duties more 
complicated than she who milks the cows or who minds the 
poultry. 

She must think and love by her own energ}', instead of bear- 
ing in her heart a thousand undeveloped sentiments. Her 
husband and her friends hunt, speculate, work, make havoc 
of their lives. Even so; she has no right to do the same. If 
she does not redeem men when she can, surely it is she who 
ruins them! 

No difhculty will discourage her if she first fully realizes 
that she possesses all that is needful for success, and then sets 
her responsibilities in a clear light. 

She will sometimes make mistakes ; enthusiasm itself, the deli- 
XV [ 20 ] 



ART 

cioiis art of giving things charm, has its perils, carrying one 
away into the unreal, opening a loophole for illusion, day- 
\ireams, prejudices, fictions. What matters it, so long as the 
tree is vigorous? Would you fell a superb poplar because 
you noticed upon it some sprigs of mistletoe? 

A woman may also go astray in point of vanity. That is 
a pretty common folly (even among men), and very provoking 
when it is shown in questions of etiquette or dress. But why 
should we not agree that there is a noble, an excellent form of 
vanity, which consists in being thoroughly acquainted with 
the things one can love, rejoicing in the apostleship one exer- 
cises, and securing success therein by cultivating diligence, 
refinement, considerateness, industry, persuasiveness? Where 
is the harm? 

But we need not dwell on these fears. The special goal 
of a woman's life, that in which it is distinguished from the 
life of men, is manifest; it is the great things, the things to be 
loved, the things which do not "pay." Man serves money. 
You make it your servant, ladies, and you must aim higher, 
at the things that are not bought and sold; attachments, real 
friendships — those are your speculations. Be faithful to your 
aim. In faithfulness is redemption. 

A moment! As I bow to you, I seem to see on my wall, 
in place of a modern paper, a grand fresco of long ago, an 
exquisite symbol of your reign : the Angel from Heaven, kneel- 
ing in humble adoration before the spotless Motherhood, pro- 
claiming that from your devotion shall proceed the welfare 
of mankind. The scene is simple and sweet, the color serene: 
a closed room, a curtain hanging, barely a glimpse of the sky. 



XV [ 21 ] 



XVI 



ART AND MORALITY 



BY 

FERDINAND BRUNETIERE 

FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE FRENCH ACADEMy] 



TT is not the purpose 0} this series to attack or to condemn. 
■* // seeks rather to tmderstatid, and to uphold. Yet there 
are some errors so obtrusive that one can only advance by pushing 
them aside, so blatant that the busy man is apt to accept them as 
being established when really they are merely being shouted. 
Such an error we here confront. The high mission oj art, its 
intimate relation with much that is noblest in lije, has perhaps 
been brought home to each of us by the words of Mr. Howells 
and Mr. DeMaule; while closely allied with this broad general 
question of the purpose of art is the problem, much discussed in 
present days, of arVs relation to morality. Now, it has been 
shouted at us that no such relation exists — as though anywhere 
in all this universe any object could stand isolated, untouching 
and untouched by its surroundings ! On the other hand, some 
men have thought that the whole deep subject of morality is per- 
haps best approached through its relationship to art. 

We in this country are sometimes accused of being too '' Puri- 
tan" a people, and of being, like our English cousins, too heavily 
"of the earth.'^ Hence it is perhaps as well that we should here 
listen to the word of a continental European, some leading man 
of letters known to and respected by us all. Such r. man is, or 
alas, was, Ferdinand Brunetiere, who died last fall. He was 
one of the "-Forty Immortals,^' the Royal Academy of France; 
he was acknowledged the foremost critic of our day; and he was 

XVI [ I ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

well known, in America as^ell as Europe, as a lecturer oj rare 
grace and power. The following address was delivered by him 
in Paris under the auspices oj the Societe des Conferences; and 
the present translation was made for the Living Age, oj Boston, 
is covered by its special copyright, and is here used by the cour 
teous permission oj its editors. M. Brunetiere^s dissection oj 
the principles oj art must prove to a layman both instructive and 
interesting; his outlook on morality may be oj even wider value. 

Ladies and Gentlemen: — 

In order that I may not surprise any one, and also that I 
may secure to myself the benefit of my frankness, T will tell 
you at the very beginning that, in this lecture, I purpose to be 
long, tiresome, obscure, and commonplace withal. And, in 
truth, the fault will not be entirely in me, but in the subject I 
have chosen: MoraHty in Art, or rather. Art and Morahty, a 
trite subject, as you know; for since the time of Plato, at least, 
it has been the common ground of conversation in academies, 
salons, studios, schools; and in spite, or rather because, of its 
banality it is a subject both complex and difiicult. 

I say because of its triteness; and indeed one of the great 
mistakes we make in regard to "commonplaces" is beheving 
them easy to deal with. We have no doubt that the easiest 
thing in the world to-day is to be, or seem to be, original; and 
the means thereto have become so simple! We simply have 
to maintain the opposite of what people around us think; to 
say of charity, for example, that there is no need to practise 
it — and that is what a whole school is teaching — to say of justice 
that there is no need to administer it ; to say of patriotism that 
it is a prejudice of another age; and twenty paradoxes of the 
same nature. This is a sure way of astonishing, of cheaply 
shocking, one's readers or hearers, and to-day it is the ABC 
of the art of the paragrapher and of the platform lecturer. 

Li these days intellectuality merely consists in thinking the 
opposite of other people! But, on the other hand, to think Hke 
everybody else; to seek solid reasons and precise reasons that 
are those of almost all reasonable people or of all cultivated 
people, to confirm people, as need be perhaps, in what the 
XVI [ 2 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

learned Professor Lombroso has called their misoneism — and 
which is only a wise distrust of novelty — to tell them there are 
ideas, old ideas, without which the hfe of humanity cannot do 
any more than without bread; in a word, to communicate to 
them the rare courage, the unusual audacity, of not wishing, 
at any price, to appear more ''advanced" than their times — 
that, ladies and gentlemen, yes, that is a difficult undertaking, 
that is a hazardous undertaking: and that is what I would 
try to do to-day. 



You know the problem, and I have only to remind you of 
the terms in which it is stated. If we are to believe the artists 
in this matter, at least certain of the artists, and the greater 
number of the critics, or aesthetes, but specially the journal- 
ists, Art, great Art, Art with a capital A, would transform, 
would transmute into pure gold everything it touches, would 
subHmate it, so to speak , and would make a thing to be ad- 
mired out of a thing obscene or most atrocious. Do not some 
call this a means of purgation ? 

"There's not a monster bred beneath the sky. 
But, well disposed by art, may please the eye," 

Pascal said the same thing, but in a far more Jansenist 
manner, when he wrote: "What a vanity is painting, which 
attracts our admiration by the imitation of things which we 
do not admire in reality." You see that I am keeping my 
promise, and one could scarcely bring forward more familiar 
quotations. 

Illustrious examples, moreover, confirm, or seem to confirm, 
the sentence of Pascal and the verses of Boileau. We admire 
in good faith, we credit ourselves with good taste for admiring, 
under Greek names, Venuses which we would not dare to name 
in French; and if we strip (I well know it is a sacrilege), but if 
we do really strip the subject of Corneille's "Rodogune" or 
of Racine's "Bajazet," for example, of the prestige of poetry, 
which transfigures them; if we reduce both of them to the 
essence of the fable which sustains them, what will remain of 
XVI [ 3 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

them but two intrigues of^e harem, which would be all very 
well in their place in the annals of crime and indecency.* 

Yet we are told, neither "Bajazet" nor "Rodogune," es- 
pecially, are works which we can tax as immoral. In seizing 
on these intrigues, the poet — and it is his privilege — has trans- 
formed their nature. That man would be condemned, he would 
be disqualified, who, in the presence of the goddesses of Praxit- 
eles, felt emotions other than those of the most chaste and dis- 
interested admiration. The fact is, we are further told, the 
artist or the poet has hfted us above what is instinctive or animal 
in us; they have performed this miracle by placing us — how, 
is not very well known, by a secret known only to them — in a 
sphere where the gross excitements of sense are unknown; they 
have freed us from ourselves (you know the theory of the liberat- 
ing power of art, that of the "purgation of the emotions," and 
I need only to allude to it in passing^); and we have entered 
with them into the region of supreme calm and of divine repose. 

La Mort peut disperser les univers tremblans, 

Mais la Beauts flamboie, et tout renait en elle, 

Et les mondes encore roulent sous ses pieds blancs.^ 

That is not my opinion. 

And first, if this were the place to produce texts, I should 
not be embarrassed to prove that Greek sculpture — I mean 
that of the great epoch — fell short of that character of ideal 
purity that we are accustomed to attribute to it. It is pagan; 
and we must remember that when we speak of it ! And pagan- 
ism is not here or there, the religion of Jupiter or that of Venus, 
the mysteries of Eleusis or the Thesmophoria, but simply, and 
in a word, the adoration of the energies of nature. Here cus- 
tom makes us bhnd; but in order to see clearly, think Vv^hat the 

' It is well known that Racine's boldness in the choice of his subjects, 
as in his freedom of observation and in the detail of his style, has long 
before equalled or surpassed the most audacious liberty that romanti- 
cism could imagine at a later time. — B 

' See Hegel's Acsthelik, and Schopenhauer on the aesthetics of 
poetry in The World as Will and Idea 

^ "Death may shatter the trembling universe; but Beauty's torch 
ever flames aloft, and all things revive, and the worlds once more roll on 
beneath her white feet." 

XVI [ 4 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

amours of the chief gods — Europa, Danae, Leda, Semele, Gany- 
mede — have become with an Ovid, for example, or with very 
great painters, a Michael Angelo, a da Vinci, a Correggio, a 
Veronese; and more generally, all those voluptuous fictions 
which, after having furnished the materials of classic art, have 
come to their end in the terrible games in the amphitheatre. 
Ask yourselves, in another art and in another order of ideas, 
whether — when we come from seeing this "Bajazet" or this 
"Rodogune" played, of which I was speaking just now — 
whether the impression which we carry from it has not some- 
thing of mingled estrangement, of suspicious estrangement ? 

On this point there is a confession of Diderot which you 
will find quite eloquent, and which will show, too, how this 
creator of "art criticism" admired the "Antiope" by Correggio.* 
Alas! gentlemen, Corneille, the great Corneille, is not always 
moral: And I mean by that that I would not be sure of the 
quality of the soul formed in the school of his "heroism" alone. 
It would be lacking in what Shakespeare has so finely called 
"the milk of human kindness." 

I continue, ladies and gentlemen, to say trite things, ex- 
ceedingly trite things, things even worthy of Mrs. Grundy, and 
what would the case be if I wished to take my examples from 
music instead of from painting, sculpture, or poetry? But 
this is the most banal of all these things — I mean that, of which 
you are all secretly, though perhaps without knowing it, most 
certainly convinced; yet which is most difficult to prove. It 
is that these examples have nothing that need astonish us if in 
every form or every species of art there is, as principle or germ, 
a furtive immorality. Note that I am not speaking of inferior 
forms of art; of the cafe-concert song, for example, of the 
vaudeville, or of the dance. Of the dance! Yes, I know that 
David danced before the ark, and we hear every day much talk 
of hieratic dances, of sacred dances, of martial dances. There 
is also the danse du ventre; and I should not be at all surprised 
if some grave author should find it symbolic. But symbolic 
or expressive of what? That is the point; and no one else 
will pretend that it is expressive of decency or modesty. "How 

^" Salon de 1 761, "and Letter to Mile. Voland, 17th Aug., 1759. 

XVI [ 5 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

much there is to a mini#P!" said a famous dancing master. 
Why, certainly, but how much of what? For, certainly the 
opera ballet may have all sorts of qualities — qualities that I 
myself may have the weakness not to despise: that they have 
not the cjuality of elevating the mind is something of which I 
am certain ! Neither has a cafe-concert song, nor a vaudeville. 

But since this is not what we ask of them, I will not insist. 
That would be to make myself ridiculous! Let us take the 
highest things. I speak to you of great art, of the greatest art : 
it is in the notion of great art that I say a germ of immoraUty 
is enveloped; and it is here that I am going to become weari- 
some. Of, rather, not yet, ladies and gentlemen; that will be 
presently; for I must first of all tell you of the memorable ex- 
ploit of M. Taine, the most glorious of his exploits, and the one 
which most eloquently testifies that in him sincerity of research 
and uprightness of character did not yield to brilliancy of talent. 

He began, as you know — in conforming with his intention 
of finding an objective foundation for critical judgments, and 
thus of rescuing the works of hterature and art from the caprice 
of particular opinions — by taking the attitude which I will not 
call indifferent or uninterested, but impartial and impersonal, 
which is that of the zoologist before the animal or of the botanist 
with regard to the plant. When the zoologist studies the habits 
of the hyena or of the antelope, of the jackal or of the dog, and 
when the botanist describes to us the rose or the Datura stra- 
monium, the belladonna or "the sacred blade which gives us 
bread," you know they always use the same patient method, 
and we do not see them angry with the ferocious beast or the 
poisonous plant. We do not find them changing either tone or 
composure of mind with their subject. Taine tried to imitate 
them, and for a moment he could believe that he had succeeded ; 
when, as yet knowing only France and England, on his appoint- 
ment as professor of aesthetics in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 
he visited Italy. That was a revelation. The difference be- 
tween the best, the mediocre, and the worst, that difference, 
that sense of difference, to which the spirit of system so easily 
blinds us in literature, because words express ideas and because 
we have a leaning toward ideas that resemble our own, how- 
XVI [ 6 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

ever feebly Ihey may be expressed — this difference which we 
do not always appreciate in music, because music is a kind of 
science as well as an art, and especially because our judgments 
do not anywhere depend more on the state of our nerves than 
in music — this, on the other hand, stands out clearly in painting, 
in sculpture ; and Taine was forcibly struck by it. 

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why, when he began those 
celebrated lectures on "The Production of the Work of Art," 
on "Art in Italy," "Art in Holland," "Art in Greece," on "The 
Ideal in Art " — certainly, with the work of Eugene Fromentin 
on "The Early Masters," and some rare writings of M. Guil- 
laume, the most remarkable things which art criticism has pro- 
duced in our times ^ — that is why it appeared to him necessary 
to classify, to judge works, to estabUsh "scales of values" — 
what is more pedantically called an aesthetic criterion- — in order 
to judge them. And where did he find this criterion, gentle- 
men, after having long sought for it, where did he find it, he, 
the pupil of Condillac and of Hegel, the theorist and philoso- 
pher of the impassibility of criticism, whose most serious re- 
proach to the Cousins and Jouffroys was that of trying to bring 
everything to the "moral point of view"? What is the sign 
by which he declared that the most elevated in the museum of 
masterpieces can be recognized ? 

It is by what he calls "the degree of beneficence in the 
character." 

And what, then, are the works he places highest in the 
heaven of art — he, I repeat, the theorist of naturahsm, whose 
deeper sympathies all went, in spite of himself, to the mani- 
festations of force and violence? Now it is "Polyeucte," "le 
Cid," "les Horace," it is "Pamela," "Clarissa," "Grandison," 
it is "Mauprat," "Fran9ois le Champi," "La Mare au Diable," 
it is "Hermann and Dorothea," it is Goethe's "Iphigenia," it 
is Tennyson with his "Idylls of the King." Who, in very 
truth, would have suspected it only three or four years before, 
when he wrote his "History of Enghsh Literature," and when, 

' Fromentin in painting and M. Eugene Guillaume in sculpture (see 
his essay on Michael Angelo) have added to Taine 's criticism what it 
lacked on the side of "technique. " — B. 

XVI [ 7 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

with an energy of style ^0ch at times resembled a gymnastic 
feat, he glorified, in the drama of Shakespeare or in the poetry 
of Byron, the splendid villany of Don Juan or of lago ? 

I do not discuss these judgments, gentlemen; I do not deny 
any of them to-day; I do not speak to you of the reservations 
they permit, and of the principal ones which the author himself 
has made. But I see in them an instructive testimony — a pre- 
sumption, if you like — for what I was saying to you just now: 
that is, that the art which has only itself as an object, the art 
which does not care for the quality of the characters it expresses ; 
the art, in a word, which does not take account of the impres- 
sions which it is capable of making on the senses or of exciting 
in the mind, that art, however great in the artist, I do not say is 
inferior (that is another question), but I say that it necessarily 
tends to immorality. I am now going to try to give you the 

reasons for this. 

II 

There is one reason which, if I am not mistaken, is as clear 
as noon-day; and which is that every form of art, in order to 
reach the mind, is obhged to have recourse to the mediation, 
not only of the senses, but of the pleasure of the senses. No 
painting but must first of all be a joy to the eye ! No music but 
must be a pleasure to the ear ! No poetry but must be a caress ! 
And that very thing, we may remark in passing, is one of the 
reasons for the changes in fashion and taste. The works exist ; 
and whether good or bad, they remain what they are. We Hke 
them or we do not hke them! They do not change in character; 
the " Ihad " is always the " Ihad," Raphael's " School of Athens " 
is always the " School of Athens." But the senses become refined, 
or rather they are sharpened ; they become more subtle and more 
exacting; they require, in order to experience the same quantity 
of pleasure, a greater amount of excitation. As has been well 
observed, "la Dame Blanche," "le Pre-aux-Clercs," and so 
many other operas we to-day call out-of-date — although their 
representation once was profitable to dozens of theatres in Ger- 
many — these works doubtless gave to our fathers the same kind 
of pleasure as " Carmen," for example, or " Die Meistersinger," 
gives us. It is because their less practised ears were less exacting. 
XVI [8] 



ART AND MORALITY 

Have you never asked yourselves at times whence comes the 
scorn it is fashionable, in the last few years, to show toward 
Raphael's painting ? Independently of the element of snobbery 
which is certainly mixed with it — and which consists in people 
thinking that this gives them the air of connoisseurs — it is be- 
cause after the lapse of fifty years our eyes have learned to 
enjoy color far more intensely than formerly. The sense for 
color, which, as you know, has had a long history, and the in- 
creasing complexity of which in the progress of time we can 
follow, seems to have profited by what the sense of design and 
form has lost. And we delight in reds or blues, yellows or 
greens to-day, as such, demanding only vigor or dehcacy. 
Perhaps this, too, is the reason, or one at least, for the develop- 
ment of landscape. The chief factor of landscape is light or 
color, a pleasure purely sensuous, or primarily sensuous, which 
it affords us; and do not the very words we use to admire, for 
example, a canvas by Corot indicate it, when we speak of the 
calm, of the freshness, of the melancholy, which we breathe 
there ? All that is not only sensed, but sensuous ; and I do not 
think I need support this point any further. 

But there result from this, ladies and gentlemen, several 
consequences; and thus it is that we see — I say, in history — 
that when art is left to itself and seeks its principle only in it- 
self — poetry, music, or painting — it degenerates into a mass of 
artifices to stir up sensuaHty. Then no one asks of it anything 
more ; it itself no longer thinks of anything but of pleasing, and 
of pleasing at any price, by every means; and it literally changes 
from a leader or from a guide, into a kind of go-between. That 
is the only name which fits it when I think of the close of the 
eighteenth century, of the novels of Duclos and of Crebillon 
the younger, of that of Laclos: "les Liaisons dangereuses " ; of 
the sculpture of Clodion; of the painting of Boucher, of Frago- 
nard ; of the Hbertine engravings of so many dandies ; of that 
furor of eroticism which disgraces not only the "Poesies" of 
Parny, but even those of Andre Chenier. 

Let us be bold enough to confess it; all this art which is so 
praised to us, which is still celebrated, all this art, in all its 
forms, was, for nearly half a century, scarcely anything but a 
XVI [9] 



ART AND MORAIJTY 

perpetual incentive to de|^|iich ; and do you think that, aUhough 
it be called elegant, debauchery is any the less dangerous ? As 
for me, I believe it is far more so ! 

Here is something graver still. At heart, when they are not 
devoid of all moral sense, these Fragonards or these Crebillons 
cannot but know that they ply a shameful trade. But the 
seduction of form sometimes works in a more subtle and in- 
sidious fashion, for which the artist or the pubhc can scarcely 
themselves account, and of which the effects are more disastrous; 
for while corrupting the principle of art there is the appearance 
of respecting it ; optimi corruptio pessima. When an exagger- 
ated importance, not to say an importance which ignores all 
else, is attributed to the form, then it is that there results, from 
this very importance, what an Italian critic, writing of the de- 
cadence of Italian art, has justly called "the difference to the 
content."^ That is when the painter, Correggio or Titian, 
with the same hand, as skilful, as caressing, as licentious, but 
as sure, with which he yesterday painted a "Madonna" or an 
"Assumption," to-day paints, warm and amber on a dark 
background, the nudity of a courtesan. It is when a Montes- 
quieu, with the same pen with which he has thrown on paper a 
sketch of the "Spirit of Law," writes the "Persian Letters" or 
the "Temple de Guide." Or better still, it is when relaxation 
is taken after writing a "Stabat" by writing the music of a 
ballet. For, what, indeed, do the things we say matter? What 
must be considered is the manner of saying them! Form is 
everything, the basis is nothing, if it is not the pretext or occa- 
sion for form. And, as this striving, as this care, as this 
passion for form never fails to lead to new effects; as the 
qualities lost are, or seem to be, replaced by others; as the 
execution becomes more masterly or more skilful, it cannot at 
first be seen where that leads to. That, ladies and gentlemen, 
leads directly to dilettanteism; and dilettanteism is the death 
both of all art and of all morahty. 

Oh, certainly, I know very well I speak like a barbarian, 
not to say like one possessed; at all events, like an iconoclast; 
and you are used to see something else in dilettanteism. Dilct- 

* Francesco de Sanctis, ' ' Storia della Letterature Italiana. ' ' 
XVI [ ID ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

tanteism, I know, for the most of those who profess it and glory 
in it, for the most of those who are in sympathy with it, means 
independence of mind, hberty, diversity, superiority of taste; 
it means absence of prejudices; it is the faculty of comprehend- 
ing everything. But, gentlemen, is it also the faculty of ex- 
cusing everything? For, indeed, we who beHeve in anything, 
and who have what are called "principles" — you know that 
that means to-day that we are limited on all sides — can any one 
imagine that, when we adopt, when we maintain, an opinion, 
we have not seen the reasons for the contrary opinion, or the 
difficulties of the one we adopt ? Alas ! there is not a critic 
or historian worthy of the name who does not argue against his 
tastes, who does not combat his own pleasures, who does not 
harden himself against the things that attract him. But dilet- 
tanteism is nothing but an incapacity for taking sides, an en- 
feeblement of the will, when it is not a clouding of the moral 
sense; and — on the most favorable supposition — a tendency, 
eminently immoral, to make of the beauty of things the measure 
of their absolute value. 

When art comes to that — and it necessarily comes to that 
whenever it seeks its end only in itself or in what is emphatically 
called the realization of pure beauty — I once more repeat, it 
is not only art which is ruined : it is morality, or, if you want 
something more precise, it is society, which has made an idol of 
it. We have a memorable example of this in the Italy of the 
fifteenth and of the sixteenth centuries, assuredly one of the 
most corrupt societies of history, according to the admission 
of all historians ; the Italy of all these tyrants to whom we seem 
to have pardoned everything because they have had triumphal 
mythologies painted in fresco on the walls and ceilings of their 
palaces; or because the daggers they buried in the breasts of 
their victims were marvellously carved by a Benvenuto CelUni. 
And do you know whence is this corruption, gentlemen ? Pre- 
cisely from this idolizing of art, or, if you prefer it, from the 
subordination of every part of public and private life to art and 
its demands. An excellent critic has said : 

"The ItaHans of the Rennaissance, under the sway of the 
fine arts, sought after form, and satisfied themselves with 
XVI [ 1 1 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

rhetoric. Therefore we^hdemn their moral disquisitions and 
their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual volup- 
tuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to these styHstic 
trifles is to regard them as products of an all-embracing genius 
for art, in a people whose most serious enthusiasms were aes- 
thetic. ... If the methods of science may be truly said to 
regulate our modes of thinking at the present time, it is no less 
true that, during the Rennaissance, art exercised a like con- 
trolling influence." 

Note, ladies and gentlemen, this last comparison; we shall 
return to it in a little while. Penetrated with the idea of the 
"beautiful," Italy went so far as to find it in crime. It recog- 
nized in a crime well done, boldly conceived, skilfully executed, 
and audaciously avowed, merits and analogues to those she ap- 
plauded in her works of art. Why is that? You see why, 
perhaps. It is in distinguishing and dividing the invisible, in 
separating the inseparable, in dissociating the form from the 
substance; it is in placing in the execution all the merit of art. 
As long as this tendency found its counterpoise in the sincerity 
of the religious, moral, social, or poHtical sentiment, it gave to 
the world the masterpieces which you know, from the "Divine 
Comedy" to the decoration of the Sistine. But according as 
the tendency was able to develop freely, the decadence of art 
was seen to commence, followed by the decadence of morahty. 
That is a first-class proof, in my opinion — a proof by the 
facts, a proof by history — that every form of art contains a 
principle of immorality, and there is another in the fact that 
it is obliged to address the mind only by the mediation of 
the pleasure of the senses, of which art must exercise a wise 
mistrust, the chief part of which will be never to seek its end 
in itself. 

It is to that, you know, that people have tried to answer, in 
giving as its end the imitation of nature; and as regards this, 
I begin by declaring that two things are equally certain: that 
we are cured of dilettanteism or of virtuosity only by returning 
to the imitation of nature ; and the other is that if the imitation 
of nature is not, perhaps, the end of art, it is at least the principle. 
"All rules," said a great painter, "have been made only to aid 

XVI [ 12 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

us in placing ourselves before nature, and thus to teach us to 
see it better " ; and a great poet has said before him : 

"Nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean ; so, over that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes." 

But what is this nature which it is a question of imitating? 
How, in what measure, ought we to imitate it ? If we feel in 
us any temptation to correct it, or, as is said, to perfect it, ought 
we to yield to it ? And how, in short, have morals or morahty 
accommodated themselves? I mean, how, in fact and in his- 
tory, have they accommodated themselves to that recommenda- 
tion and that principle ? 

I will not examine, gentlemen, whether nature is always 
beautiful, or whether it is never so. The question would take 
us too far afield. Truly, I, for my part, will freely say that if 
colors are not in objects, but in our eye (and that is proven), the 
proof would have greater validity for that relative and changing 
quality which is called "Beauty." Plato has said, or rather 
has been made to say, that "the beautiful is the splendor of the 
true"; and I admire Plato; none the less, this is an example of 
one of these immortal blunders which we piously transmit 
from generation to generation. If we only take the trouble to 
try to understand ourselves, there is no "beauty" in a geo- 
metrical theorem, nor in a chemical law, or at least the beauty 
shines in it only with a mild brilliance, modest and timid. 
There is beauty, in the human sense of the word, only in tliose 
very general laws that are, properly speaking, hypotheses rather 
than laws, and of which I do not wish to speak disparagingly, 
because it may be that the search for them is the very end, the 
highest end, of science. But, on the other hand, we might 
easily show that there have been some very great mistakes. 
But, I repeat, and without wishing to examine the question, 
ugliness as well as beauty is in nature ; and you know, we all 
know, some artists who have seen it alone. The romanticists 
have even made the representation of the ugly an essential part 
of their aesthetics — and it certainly is not on this point that 
contemporary naturalism has disavowed them. 
XVI [13] 



ART AND MORALITY 

What is still more c^Rin, and what is especially important 

to us to-day, is that, beautiful or ugly, nature is not "good"; 

and I scarcely need to maintain this point, since the Schopen- 

hauers, the Darwins, the Vignys, have firmly established it. 

Do not let us needlessly complicate matters, and do not let us 

embarrass ourselves with metaphysical complications. If the 

first need of a creature is "to preserve its being," nature, you 

know well enough, has, as it were, surrounded us with snares, 

and we cannot make a movement without running the risk of 

perishing by it. Life is spent in learning to live, and no sooner 

have we succeeded in it than we die. Does the living console 

us, and can we say, with the poet, 

" Mais la nature est la, qui invite et qui t'aime 
Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours"? ^ 

Her "bosom" is rather a stepmother's; and her indiffer- 
ence to us is equalled only by her lack of regard for all that we 
call by the name of good or bad. 

"On me dit une mere et je suis une tombe, 
Mon hiver prend vos morts comme son hecatombe, 
Men printemps ne sent pas vos adorations." ^ 

Let us go still further, gentlemen ; nature is immoral, thoroughly 
immoral, I may say immoral to such a degree that everything 
moral is, in a sense, and especially in its origin, in its first prin- 
ciple, only a reaction against the lessons or counsels that nature 
gives us.^ Vitium hominis, natura pecus, I believe St. Augus- 
tine has said; there is no vice of which nature does not give us 
the example, nor any virtue from which she does not dissuade 
us. This is the empire of brute force and unchained instincts, 
neither moderation nor shame, neither pity nor compassion, 
neither charity nor justice; all species are armed against one 
another, in muua junera; all passions aroused, every individual 
ready to oppose every other — that is the spectacle that nature 
offers us; and if we imitate it, who does not see and who does 

i"But nature is ever there, inviting thee and loving thee; plunge 
into her bosom, ever open for thee." 

2 "They call me a mother, and I am a tomb; my winter takes your 
dead as its hecatomb; my spring does not listen to your worships." 

3 1 have tried to show this in a brochure, "La Moralite de la Doc- 
trine Evolutive " 

XVI [ 14 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

not understand what humanity would become in so doing? 
Plunge us into nature! Why, gentlemen, if we were not 
careful, that would be to plunge us into animality; and that is 
what has not been understood by certain who are inviting us 
to take "nature" only for a guide in all things — that they were 
inviting us to go back again over the very steps of history and 
civiUzation. We have become men, and can become more so 
each day only by detaching ourselves from nature, and by try- 
ing to institute in the midst of it '' an Empire within an Empire." 

Shall I add to this that it is not always true? That is 
what I ought to do if I keep myself narrowly within the bounds 
of my subject. Nature has its failures, it has its exceptions, it 
has its monstrosities. If we are to attach a precise meaning to 
the words, which will make us understand, it is not "natural" 
to be bhnd or a hunchback; and that is what so many artists 
readily forget. They also forget that 

" Some thoughts may be too strong to be believed." 
We see examples of it every day. Every day there happens the 
reality that resembles a fiction, and, on the other hand, the 
fiction that one would take for a reality. It is even a common- 
place with novehsts to say that they invent nothing that reality 
does not surpass. , . . But all these considerations are purely 
aesthetic, and to-day I am interested in the relations between 
morahty and art. 

Now you see that ttiey are of sucn a nature that, as we have 
just now seen, immorality may be engendered in the very seduc- 
tion of the form ; so in the same way it is always to be feared lest 
it may also result from a too faithful imitation. Examples of 
this are innumerable in the history of painting, and especially 
of literature. But, as I should compromise myself if I here 
invoked the memory of the "Tales" of La Fontaine, or of his 
"Fables," it is the author of "Andromaque" and of "Bajazet" 
that I shall ask to offer me his repentance. For, indeed, when 
this great man, in the maturity of life and genius, not yet having 
reached forty — that is, the age at which Moliere had just begun 
to write' — abandoned the stage, what sentiments do you think 

^Racine, born 1639, renounced the stage, 1677. Moliere, born 
1622, presented the " Precieuses Ridicules," 1659. 

XVI [15] 



ART AND MORALITY 

dictated his conduct ? H^i^as afraid of himself, afraid of the 
truth of the paintings he had made; of the terrible fidelity with 
which he had rendered what is most natural in the passions; 
of the justification that he had found for their excess in their 
conformity to instinct; and that is why from that moment his 
Hfe was nothing but one long expiation for the errors of his 
genius. Let us regret it if we will! But let us not have minds 
so narrow as to be astonished at it; nor especially to blame the 
poet for it ; and let us consider that at this very moment there is 
an example of this very thing in him who was in his hour the il- 
lustrious novehst of "War and Peace," and of "Anna Karenina." 
You will find the proof of this in the work "What is Art?" in 
which he wages the same warfare as I do to-day — and if this 
endeavor appears only ordinary in a critic, or in a historian of 
ideas, so much the worse for those who did not understand how 
heroic it is in a novehst. 

In that work he brings to light a final cause of that im- 
morality which we can look upon as inherent in the very prin- 
ciple of art. I mean a condition which seems to be imposed 
on the artist, and which consists, in order to assure his origi- 
nahty, not precisely in his cutting himself off from the society 
of other men, and shutting himself in his "ivory tower," but 
in his distinguishing himself from the crowd. La Bruyere has 
excellently said, "If we always listened to criticism there is 
not a work that would not be completely founded on it"; and 
he was right. Painter, poet, sculptor, or musician, if the origi- 
nality of the artist is to feel, by the same things, sensations 
different from other men, it would seem that one of his cares 
should be not to let them in any way become "banal," and 
consequently it would seem that this right of separation from 
the crowd cannot be denied him. But to what dangers at all 
times, and especially at a time like ours, does not the appHca- 
tion of this principle lead ? 

By it, humanity is divided into two kinds of men: "Artists," 
who make art, and the " Phihstines," the "Bourgeois," who do 
not make it, or who do not understand it as the "artists" do, 
or who do not like the same art as they. In this connection, 
recall Flaubert in his "Correspondence," of the Gencourts in 
XVI [ i6 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

their "Journal." It has been said, and I hasten to subscribe 
to it, "What love, what passion, what religion for their art!" 
And, in truth, that is admirable! But also what ignorance, 
what thoughtlessness for all that is not art and their art ; what 
scorn of their contemporaries, of the "Messrs. Dumas, Augier, 
Feuillet," of all the novels that are not "Madame Bovary," of 
all the comedies that are not "Henriette Marechal"! Evi- 
dently all of us — we who beHeve that there may be something 
else in life than art — in their eyes we are all only simple Bouvards 
or frightful Peceuchets. We are the crowd, and the crowd is 
always to be despised. 

"I beUeve that the crowd, the flock, will always De nateiui. 
In so far as the people do not bow before the mandarins, in so far 
as the Academy of Sciences will not take the place of the Pope, 
society to its very roots will be only a lot of sickenin ghumbugs." 

I do not stop over the strangeness of the phrase — which 
would be worthy of a place on the wall of the editor's office — 
but you see the sentiment! I do not even reply that if it is by 
works that we must ultimately test doctrines, we can conceive 
of a more useful employment in life than writing "Paradise 
Artificiel," "Tentations de Saint- Antoine," "Faustin, " and 
"Fille Elsa." But I ask you, gentlemen, whether the con- 
sequence of the doctrine is not to make art consist in what is 
most inhuman and most foreign to our occupations, our cares, 
our anxieties ! 

Not that for this reason the authors repel praises or ad- 
miration. "Money is always good," said an Emperor; and 
our "Artists" think that from whatever hand it may come, 
admiration is always good to take and to retain if possible. 
Only, if, in the midst of these praises, any misunderstanding 
arises between the artist and the public, it is always the public 
that is in the wrong ; and let us render this justice to the artists ; 
they think it a matter of honor to aggravate the misunder- 
standing. Ah, but we are reproached for our harshness of 
manner ! Well, we will be still more harsh, and we will elevate 
our very lack of feeling into a principle of art. Ah, but we are 
told that they claim from us emotion and feeHng! Well, then 
we will take shelter in our indifference and coldness! What 
XVI [17] 



ART AND MORALITY 

do we care for the misericl^f humanity ! "The crowd is always 
hateful!" We are the mandarins, before whom you must bow! 
To others the business of justice and charity! As for us, we 
are busy with art; that is, we are pounding colors and wt are 
cadencing phrases. We are noting sensations, and we are pro- 
ducing artificial ones to note! We are doing "artistic writing," 
and if we are not admired it is so much the worse for our con- 
temporaries! But it is all the better for us, for he who docs 
not understand us judges himself; and the incomprehensi- 
bility of our invention is simply a proof of our superiority. It 
pleases us to be misunderstood. 

Thus it is that people bury themselves in a proud self- 
satisfaction; and that would not matter if it did not entail the 
monopoHzing of the attention by a coterie! But what I hate 
about these paradoxes — and without taking into account the 
fact that they do nothing less than cut art off from its com- 
munications with life — is that they are eminently and insolently 
aristocratic. A little indulgence, O great artists, and permit 
us to be men! Yes, permit us to believe that there is some- 
thing else in the world as important as pounding colors or 
cadencing phrases! Do not imagine that we are made for you, 
and that for six thousand years humanity has travailed, has 
labored, has suffered, only to establish your mandarinate. We 
could do without you much more easily than without many other 
things! And you yourselves, after all, how, on what, in what 
conditions would you hve if the incessant toil of these Bouvards, 
whom you despise, and of these Peceuchcts, for whom you have 
nothing but ironies sufficiently cruel, did not assure you the 
security of your leisure, the peace of your meditations, a pubhc 
to admire you, and, I may even say, your daily bread ? 

Ill 

Whither does this discourse tend, ladies and gentlemen, and 
what are the conclusions I wish to draw from it ? That art, as 
has been said of love, is mixed, especially in our time, "with a 
host of things with which it has no more to do than the Doge 
has with what is done in Venice." Of course, and, for that 
matter, nothing need hinder a picture dealer or a book pub- 
XVI [i8] 



ART AND MORALITY 

lishcr from being a true "artist." That has been seen more 
than once in history. The studio of more than one great painter 
in Italy or in Flanders has often been nothing more than a 
manufactory of cartoons or of canvases, and two of the rare 
surviving works of our eighteenth century, "Manon Lescaut" 
and "Gil Bias," were, as was then said, made for the publisher. 
No, it is not the love of lucre that is the worst enemy of art. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I do not mean, either, that the artist 
or the writer ought to metamorphose themselves into moral 
preachers. There are sermonizers and moralists for that, whose 
purpose or trade it is. Whatever admiration I have for Richard- 
son, that is what prevents me from speaking of " Clarissa Har- 
lowe" with the declamatory enthusiasm of Diderot, and still 
more from daring to place his "Pamela" or his "Grandison" 
so high in the history of art as you have seen that Taine has 
placed them. We must try not to confuse anything! 

But, as I have tried to show you, if every form of art, so far 
as it is a pleasure of the senses, and in so far as it is an imitation 
and consequently an apology for nature, and, again, in so far 
as it develops in the artist this ferment of egotism which is a 
part of his individuality — if every form of art, when thus left to 
itself, runs the inevitable risk of "demoralizing" or of "de- 
humanizing" a soul, then we must premise, in the first place, 
that art has not all the liberties. "Stop, my child," said Mon- 
tesquieu to his daughter, whom he found reading the "Persian 
Letters," "stop; that is a book of my youth that is not made for 
yours"; and I have told you that in my opinion it was not to 
become a convert that Racine abandoned the theatre, but that 
he believed he ought to become a convert because he had written 
plays, or rather because he was the creator of his plays, the 
father of Hermione, of Roxane, and of Phedre. As for the aged 
Corneille, he did not feel the need of becoming a convert. Why 
so? For a very simple and sufficiently evident reason! Be- 
cause in his old age, as in the morning of his glory, he was con- 
vinced that Rodrigue had done right in avenging Don Diegue's 
honor; that Horace was excusable for having hurled in Ca- 
mille's teeth the curses she spewed forth against Rome; that 
Polycucte was to be praised for having overthrown the idols, 
XVI [ 19] 



ART AND ISrORALITY 



and for having preferred me conversion of Paulina to the tran- 
quiUity of their amours. He did not become a convert, because 
he believed that he never excited other than generous and noble 
passions, even if he thought more than once of depicting base 
or sanguinary ones. He did not become a convert, because, 
as Taine told you just now, he beheved that he, "vi^hosc hand 
had sketched the soul of the great Pompey," worked only for 
the exaltation of the "Will"; and of all the human faculties, 
will, real will, is at once the rarest of things, and the thing of 
which men have always thought the most, first, because it is 
the rarest, and then because it is the real cause of personal and 
social progress. 

This is the same thing as saying, in the second place, that if 
the end of art is not to move the passions or to tickle the senses, 
neither can it be complete, and narrow itself in any w^ay within 
itself. There are several ways of interpreting the theory of 
"art for art's sake," and on this point, as on all, it is only a 
matter of coming to an agreement; and unfortunately that is 
most frequently what people do not want to do. But if the 
theory of "art for art's sake" consists in seeing in art only art 
itself, I know of nothing more false, and I have tried to tell you 
why. Art has its object and its end outside of and beyond 
itself; and if that object is not exactly moral, it is social, which, 
for that matter, is the same thing. Whether we are painters or 
poets, we are not allowed to forget that we are men; and in 
return for the society of men we must give the means of propa- 
ganda or of action, which we hold from them alone. Do you 
remember in this connection, or do you know, that page of 
Alexandre Dumas? I say "do you know"; for you will not 
find it in all the editions of his plays, but only in that which is 
called the " Edition des Comediens " : 

"What has made the dramatic poets great, v/hat has most 
ennobled the stage, are the subjects which at first sight seemed 
absolutely incompatible with the habits of the stage or of the 
public. Thus we cannot be told, 'Stop here or there.' All 
that is man and woman belongs to us, not only in the relations 
of these two creatures between themselves by the sentiments 
and the passions, but in their isolated or collective relations 
XVI [ 20 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

with all kinds of occurrences, of customs, of ideas, of powers, 
of social, moral, political, and religious laws, which, in turn, 
produce their action on them." 

That, certainly, might be better said ; and I sometimes fear, 
gentlemen, that, one or two pieces aside, imperfection of form 
will draw the drama of Alexandre Dumas into obHvion; but 
you understand sufficiently well what he means, and I assent to 
it entirely. Art has a social function, and its true morality is 
the conscientiousness with which it discharges this function. 

You will tell me that this formula is vague, and I acknowl- 
edge it. If it were not vague, if it had the precision of a geo- 
metrical formula or of a medical prescription (are medical pre- 
scriptions so very precise ?) we should no longer be dealing with 
art, or criticism, or history, but with science. Let us leave 
the learned in their laboratories, and let us not imagine that we 
can find the secret of genius or moral law in the bottom of a 
retort. But for that, ladies and gentlemen, you must give me 
your attention for a moment longer. 

There is scarcely any doctrine more widely diffused among 
us than t^iat of "the relativity of knowledge." But what ex- 
actly does it mean? That is what many people do not seem 
to know who none the less profess belief in it ; and you see how 
it can be reclothed with meaning. 

To say that everything is relative may mean that nothing 
is false and nothing is true, but everything is possible; every- 
thing therefore is probable; and each of us becomes "the 
measure of all things," as the ancient sophist taught ; all opinions 
have worth, and the only difference between them is the manner 
of expressing them. I do not pause, gentlemen, over this in- 
terpretation. 

But in the second place, to say that everything is relative 
may mean that everything depends, not only for each of us 
individually, but for man in general, the species, on the con- 
stitution of its organs, and that, if we had our cranium made 
otherwise, or if we had six senses, for example, in place of five, 
or four dimensions in place of three, the universe would appear 
to us under an aspect entirely different from that which we 
know. Bodies would be revealed to us by other qualities; ^ve 
XVI [21 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

should perceive in them wW^ we do not now perceive, unknown 
forms and nameless colors. It is very possible and I readily 
believe it! But I know nothing about it, nor does any one else; 
and besides it does not matter. If in another planet bodies 
have n plus i dimensions instead of three, how can that affect 
us as long as we know nothing about it, and when there are 
only three on this earth? What does it matter to us that the 
color of the flower or the taste of the fruit is in our eye, or in 
our palate, provided that the rose is always red and the orange 
is always scented ? Do you feel yourselves humiliated or cha- 
grined by it ? 

But there is a third way of understanding the relativity of 
knowledge, and the best, which is — as Pascal said, and also 
both Comte and Kant — that " all things being causes and caused, 
aiding and aided," a thing can be exactly defined only by its 
relations to another thing. Each of you is seated in his place 
in this room. But how can I give an idea of it to any one out- 
side? That will be done only in beginning by describing the 
arrangement of the room, of the seats, my situation, the left 
chair, the right chair, that at the back, that at the front, and 
ten, twenty, other details. In other words, every object is rela- 
tive to an infinity of others with which it stands in relations 
more or less constant, and moreover, according to their nature, 
more or less complex to determine. Or, again, and in general 
philosophical terms if you wish, everything is entangled in a 
system of relations from which its character results; and that 
is what Pascal meant when he added to the other part of the 
phrase which I have just recalled to you: "I hold it impossible 
to know the parts without knowing the whole, as it is to know 
the whole without knowing the parts." If we knew only Ra- 
cine's '* Thebaide," just think what a strange idea we should have 
of his genius; and how badly we should know it if we did not 
know who preceded and followed him! A certain knowledge 
of the "Cid" and of "Polyeucte" thus forms a part of the very 
definition of "Andromaque" or of "Phedre," and that defini- 
tion, in turn, needs to be completed by some knowledge of 
"Zaire" and of "Merope." We know Racine truly only when 
we know him in his relation to Voltaire and Corneille, and all 

XVI [ 22 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

these in their relation to Shakespeare or to Euripides, and all 
in relation to a certain idea of tragedy, which still other relations 
determine. 

If we put ourselves at this point of view, we perceive, gentle- 
men, that the definition of art is thus relative to the definition 
of other social functions, to which it holds, or ought to hold, 
determinate relations; or if you prefer, it appears that, like 
religion, like science, like tradition, art is a force, the use of 
which cannot be regulated by itself and by itself alone. These 
forces must be balanced among themselves in a well-ordered 
society; and none among them can estabhsh its absolute domi- 
nation over the others without harm, and sometimes disaster, 
resulting therefrom. If it is rehgion that gains the day and 
subordinates tradition, science, and art, the history of the Papacy 
of the middle ages is there to tell us of the grandeurs, but also 
of the dangers of theocracy. If it is tradition, custom, super- 
stitious respect for the past, which make themselves masters of 
consciences, and consequently of actions, it seems to me — I 
dare not say more — but it seems to me that the example of 
China emerges from the shade at this moment to teach us, 
with its advantages of stability, the dangers of immobility. If 
art in its turn seizes the entire life, in order to govern it, it may 
indeed flatter the imagination of some dilettantes; but we have 
looked closely at this matter just now, and the Italy of theRenais- 
sance, to which I can add the Greece of the decadence, is there 
to prove to us that the danger is not any less. I would say freely 
it is greater still, or as great, when we give over, as has been 
tried in our days, to positive and experimental science the work 
of directing or ordering existence. On the contrary, gentlemen, 
the great epochs of history are precisely those in which these 
forces have been placed in equihbrium — and such have been, 
in France chiefly — the great years of the seventeenth century, 
or the early years of our own. 

Does the realization of that equihbrium depend on the will 
of men? And are we able at every moment of the period to 
prevent one of the forces from advancing in excess of the other ? 
For my part, gentlemen, I beheve we can. I beheve that, if 
we wish, we can maintain the authority of tradition againsl the 
XVI [ 23 ] 



ART AND MORALITY 

craze of novelty. I bclidj^ that it depends only on ourselves 
to prevent even religion from encroaching on the liberty of 
scientific research. I believe that we can stem, check, prevent 
science from overstepping the limits of its own domain. And 
I also believe that — just as science is characterized by a sort 
of moral indifferentism,^ so art, as I have tried to show you, is 
characterized on its i)art by an unconscious tendency to im- 
morality — we can, if we will, annul these effects, not only with- 
out harming it, but in directing it to its proper object. But 
will would be needed; and unhappily we Uve in a time when — 
to give meaning to an old distinction that might be thought 
very subtle and very vain and which profound philosophers 
have denied — the failure, or rather the enfecblement, of the 
will has perhaps no equal except in the increasing intensity 
of the desires. 

^See the brochures: "Science et Religion," "Education et In- 
struction," and "La Moralite de la Doctrine Evolutive." 



XVI [ 24 ] 



XVII 



WOMAN 



"MARRIAGE CUSTOMS AND THEIR MORAL VALUE" 

BY 

ELIZABETH S. DIACK 

AND 

WILLIAM LILLY 

SECRETARY OF THE CATHOLIC UNION OF GREAT BRITAIN 



/^LOSE allied to the question of morality in general, comes 
^ the question of woman in her relation to life and to man. 
We face the narrower problem first, her relation to the man. For 
historic information our readiest appeal is to the well-known 
English authoress upon the subject, Elizabeth Stitchell Diack. 
She outlines for us "the woman of the past'' as her confrere, Mr. 
Robinson, has outlined the man. Aiming then to carry our study 
up to the present day, we present briefly the thought of Mr. Lilly. 
The Hon. William S. Lilly, M.A., J. P., is a Roman Catholic; 
in fact his long service as secretary to the Catholic Union of Great 
Britain, a post which he has. held since 1874, enables him in 
some sort to speak officially for the Catholics of England, as Car- 
dinal Gibbons has aheady spoken to us for those of America. 
Moreover, it is well that on this serious question of marriage 
we should listen to the views of the Catholic body among our 
contemporaries. 

Matrimony, once apparently the most firmly established and 
settled of human institutions, begins in these inquisitive and 
skeptic days to find itself no longer unquestioned. Its security 
is assailed; its wisdom is doubted; nay, its very morality is held 
open to dispute. Trial marriages and "ten-year periods" are 
discussed with an openness that a single decade ago would have 
been impossible. 

xvn [i] 



WOMAN 

Under these circumst(0^cs the Catholic Church should have 
a hearing; jor it is an established fact that during many cen- 
turies that church has been the most emphatic and insistent oj 
the opponents of divorce. In reading Mr. Lilly^s presentation 
oj the moral aspects oj the question, it were well also to turn back 
{address IX) and note how these are reinjorced by Mr. Wallace's 
analysis oj the same subject jrom its scientific side. 

Among the primitive nations of the world woman was com- 
monly regarded as a chattel or slave — a creature existing and 
originally created merely to minister to the wants of man. The 
Egyptians alone treated her with respect and consideration. 

In Ancient Egypt monogamy was practised, although it was 
not enjoined by law. There is no evidence of the existence of a 
marriage ceremony, but the marriage contract secured to the 
wife certain rights, one of which was that of complete control 
over her husband, who promised to yield her imphcit obedience ! 
Nearness of relationship was no barrier to wedlock, the union 
of brother with sister being quite common. 

Women, both married and unmarried, participated with the 
men in all the pleasures of social intercourse. They took part 
in the public festivals, shared in banquets, drove out in their 
chariots, and made pleasure excursions on the Nile. At ban- 
quets the guests were entertained chiefly with music and dancing. 
Singing was also an esteemed accomplishment, and the more 
solid part of their education must have been attended to, as 
women often held important offices in the priesthood. They 
presided at birth and officiated as mourners at death and burial. 

Ladies of rank occupied their spare moments in embroidery 
and in the cultivation of flowers, of which they were passionately 
fond, and which were lavishly used on all festive occasions. 
Women of the humbler classes were ernployed in spinning, and 
in the rural districts in tending cattle and sheep, and in carrying 
water — the heavier employments being left to the men. 

This halcyon state of affairs lasted only during the days of 
Egypt's greatness ; during the period of her decline her daughters 
were fearfully downtrodden and degraded. The hardest man- 
ual labor was assigned to them, and they suffered cruel punish- 
ments for the crimes of their fathers, husbands, or brothers, 
xvn [ 2 ] 



WOMAN 

as the case might be. Sometimes they were publicly beaten 
with sticks, at others thrown into dungeons or sent to work at 
the mines, where the miseries they endured were so great that, 
as the old historian tells us, they longed for death as far prefer- 
able to life. 

In Babylonia, and also in Persia, woman was a mere chattel 
of man. She had no rights, and was supposed to have no feel- 
ings. Assyrian maidens had no voice in the disposal of them- 
selves in marriage. Those of marriageable age were once a 
year collected and brought together into one place, there to be 
sold to the highest bidders. The most beautiful were offered 
for sale first, and these were eagerly competed for by the wealthy 
men of the community desirous of marrying. With the money 
obtained for the beauties, the plain and deformed ones were 
dowered, so that they, too, might obtain husbands, they being 
given to the men who offered to take the smallest sums. Each 
purchaser was obliged to give security for the due fulfilment 
of the marriage contract — marriage being a condition of pur- 
chase — and for the pubUc acknowledgment of his newly ac- 
quired wife. If a pair found on coming together that they 
could not live amicably the husband could return his purchase 
and receive back his money, but the wife who repudiated her 
husband was condemned to be drowned. Womanly purity was 
discountenanced by the Babylonians, and woman's Hfe was held 
in light esteem. During a period of revolt thousands of women 
were massacred by their own nearest relatives, merely to save 
the provisions which otherwise they would have required. 

In Ancient Greece the position of woman varied in the 
different eras and in the different states. In the renowned 
State of Sparta women were regarded as instruments for the 
production of strong, robust citizens for the State, and great 
care was taken that they should be well developed physically. 
They were from their earHest youth allowed the utmost hberty, 
and were exercised in running, wrestling, and boxing, accom- 
pHshments which they displayed in the pubHc games at the 
theatre. Scantily clad, so as to allow perfect freedom of mo- 
tion, and crowned with flowers, they also took part in the rehg- 
ious ceremonies, and sang and danced at the national festivals. 
On ordinary, as on festive occasions, the dress of the Spartan 
XVII [ 3 ] 



WOMAN 

women was of the simp|p^ description. A woollen robe loose 
at one side, and fastening with clasps over the shoulder, was 
the attire of maidens, while married women wore also an 
upper garment and a veil. The wearing of embroidery, gold, 
and precious stones was restricted to prostitutes. 

When they married, which, according to Plutarch, was not 
till they had arrived at maturity, they were always well dowered. 
We are told by the same writer that the Spartan bride was 
dressed "in man's clothes," and had her hair "cut close to the 
skin." Her troth was plighted, not to her husband, but to the 
State, and patriotism seems to have been a leading sentiment 
in her bosom. For some time after her marriage the wife con- 
tinued to reside with her parents, seeing her husband but occa- 
sionally, by stealth, and disguised in masculine apparel. Spe- 
cially beautiful women were allowed to have several husbands, 
and so lightly was the marriage tie regarded that a man could, 
if he chose, give away his wife without any legal process 
whatever. Indeed, it was considered rather a meritorious 
action for him to do so. Heiresses were at the disposal of 
the king, who, without consulting either themselves or their 
parents, bestowed them upon the poorest citizens, that the 
wealth of the nation might be equally distributed among all 
classes. 

During the frequent absences of their warHke lords the 
Spartan women had entire control of their households and 
their affairs. So much power did they enjoy in comparison 
with other women of the time, that a foreign lady on one occa- 
sion said to Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, "You of Laced?emon 
are the only women in the world that rule the men," whereat 
the Spartan quickly retorted, "We are the only women that 
bring forth men." 

In other parts of Greece women led lives of strict seclusion. 
They seem to have scarcely been allowed to leave their own 
r.partments, which were always situated in the back, and com- 
monly in the upper part of the house, so as to insure the utmost 
privacy. Young girls had to ask permission to go from one 
part of the house to another, and the reputation of a newly 
married woman was in danger if she were seen out of doors. 
When she became a mother she enjoyed a little more freedom, 
•XVII [4] 



WOMAN 

though only during her husband's pleasure, for those of a jealous 
temperament kept their wives in close confinement. By the 
laws of Solon women were prohibited from leaving home with 
more than three changes of clothing and a certain allowance of 
provisions, or a basket of more than a cubit's length. Neither 
were they permitted to appear in the streets at night, save in a 
chariot and preceded by torch-bearers. It is said that those 
strict laws were framed in order to check the depravity of the 
daughters of Athens, but it was not only to the peregrinations 
of women that the laws of the great Athenian extended, but to 
all the details of daily life, including even eating and drinking. 

The ordinary employments of women, apart from their 
domestic duties, were spinning, weaving, embroidery, and other 
kinds of needlework. Instruction in these mechanical arts 
seems to have been all the education they received — all that 
was considered necessary or fitting for them. "She is the best 
woman," says Thucydides, "of whom least is said either of good 
or evil." 

An orphan heiress was compelled by law to marry her next- 
of kin, in order to keep the property in the family. When, 
however, she had married prior to the death of her father, she 
could, at his decease, be taken from her husband and given 
to her relative along with her estate, the bond of wedlock, as 
in Sparta, being somewhat loosely regarded and quite easily 
dissolved. 

As in Sparta, too, a man could give away his wife either for 
a time, or permanently, as he desired. It was by no means the 
most depraved or the meanest of mankind who exercised this 
strange privilege, Socrates and Pericles being among the 
number. 

During the golden age of Athens, when the ashes of her 
illustrious law-giver had long been at rest in his native isle (for 
Solon was an Athenian but by adoption), the daughters of the 
classic city enjoyed more freedom than they had done in earlier 
days. Husbands when they went from home often took their 
wives along with them, but from a moral point of view it was 
not always the best of society into which they were thus intro- 
duced. The house of the celebrated Aspasia, the mistress of 
Pericles, was a favorite resort of even the wisest and highest 
XVII [ 5 ] 



WOMAN 

cultured of the citizens oiP^thens. This remarkable woman 
was noted, not only for her beauty, but for her talents, and for 
the elevation to which she had attained in learning. The un- 
fortunate class to which she belonged was then the only class of 
women in Athens that enjoyed freedom and culture. Whether 
from a desire to heighten their charms by means of a knowledge 
of "divine philosophy," or from a genuine love of learning, 
many of them frequented the schools and the company of phi- 
losophers and studied mathematics and other sciences. Their 
personal beauty often made them the chosen models of painters 
and sculptors, and the themes of licentious poets, and, as we 
have already said, Aspasia, who was at their head, wielded 
such a powerful influence over even their best and wisest men 
that they resorted to her house as to a lecture-room, accom- 
panied by their wives. They evidently wished the latter to 
profit by the learned and brilliant conversation of the gifted 
courtesan, who at least had taught them that the life of ignor- 
ance and seclusion to which they doomed their women was 
that which was least calculated to develop their mental powers 
and render them congenial companions. The corrupt condi- 
tion of society, however, may be inferred from the fact that 
such women occupied a prominent, almost a leading, position in 
it, and, indeed, at this period, the golden age of Grecian art and 
literature, learning, luxury, and vice were equally dominant in 
"the eyes and Hght of Greece," as her panegyrists called Athens. 
"In the brave days of old" the Roman patriarch could, 
with the sanction of the law, throw his daughter into a dungeon, 
deprive her of food, lash her with the scourge, sell her as a slave, 
or slay her with the sword. When she married, her husband 
assumed over her the same power. She could, like the Grecian 
woman, inherit either the whole or a part of her father's estate ; 
but whatever property she possessed, or whatever right of in- 
heritance, was at marriage passed over to her husband. She 
could be divorced for drinking wine, or even for having in her 
possession the keys of any place in which it was kept. A wife 
could, however, be divorced almost at pleasure, provided that 
her dowry was returned along with her. For a considerable 
period a woman was forbidden by law to wear a garment of 
various colors, to have personal ornaments weighing more than 
xvii [ 6 ] 



WOMAN 

half an ounce of gold, and to drive in a chariot within a mile 
of the city. In those early days the women were employed in 
cooking, spinning, weaving, and sewing. 

When the Romans became rich in the usual way, by plunder- 
ing their neighbors, the laws relative to woman's dress and 
recreation were repealed; the domestic duties were relegated 
to slaves, and the Roman matron blossomed into a lady of 
fashion. 

There were "blue-stockings" as well as "belles," however, 
among the ladies of ancient Rome. The speech of Hortensia 
against the unjust taxation of women, delivered before the three 
assassins who governed Rome during the second triumvirate, 
is mentioned admiringly by Cicero, and her courage must have 
been as great as her eloquence, since no man could be found to 
undertake the perilous task. In another of ItaHa's cities it is 
evident that the "new woman" was in existence at a very early 
date. One of the inscriptions found among the ruins of Pom- 
peii shows that women were put forward by women as candi- 
dates for seats on the board of magistrates, but whether suc- 
cessful or not in gaining the coveted office is not recorded. 
Honored, however, above all other women were the vestals, to 
whose care were committed the sacred rehcs upon which the 
safety of the city was supposed to depend. Often they were 
the custodians of wills and other important documents, and 
enjoyed many privileges denied to ordinary mortals. 

The usual accomplishments of the Roman maiden were 
music and dancing. During the Empire, however, ladies were 
skilled in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and often appeared in 
the amphitheatre as competitors for the prize. They appeared 
there more frequently, however, as spectators of the bloody 
gladiatorial combats in which unfortunate slaves, unhappy cap- 
tives, or not less unhappy criminals were butchered to make 
a Roman holiday. Cruelty, gluttony, and even drunkenness 
had become prominent traits in the character of the Roman 
lady of those latter days, and those ugly vices are apt to ob- 
scure the virtues of the simple matrons, the pure-minded Lu- 
cretias of early Rome. 

Among the ancient Germanic tribes women were regarded 
with peculiar reverence, and were commonly treated as the 
XVII [ 7 ] 



WOMAN 

equals, sometimes as the s^Mriors, of men. They were believed 
to be recipients of messages from the gods, and, like the rhap- 
sodists of Greece, they were the repositories of the unwritten 
history of the race, the reciters of the poems in which were 
commemorated the stories of the tribal heroes. The "wise 
women," who were carefully set apart from the rest, were be- 
lieved to be endowed with the power of lifting the veil of the 
future and learning the decrees of fate, and so were often con- 
sulted as oracles. Others were supposed to be gifted with 
supernatural powers, because of their allegiance to mahgnant 
divinities. The daugliters of kings and princes were often 
priestesses, but what were their official duties it is difficult to 
say. We are told by Tacitus that the priests settled disputes, 
awarded and inflicted punishments, and attended the armies 
to battle. 

Both sexes were remarkable for their conjugal fidelity, monog- 
amy being practised except in the case of royalty, the posses- 
sion of more than one wife being a purely regal privilege. The 
marriage ceremony in those primitive times was exceedingly 
simple, consisting chiefly of the interchange of presents in the 
presence of the friends assembled for the feast. Says Tacitus, 
"To the husband the wife gives no dowry, but the husband to 
the wife." The present of the bride, he continues, "consisted 
of oxen, horses, and arms to intimate to her that she was to 
share in the toils and dangers of her husband as well as in his 
pleasures." This it was customary for her to do, for the wife 
of the ancient German was her husband's companion and 
counsellor in time of peace and his comrade in time of war. 

Of the male sex, he says, "those who are bravest and most 
warHke among them never do any work or mind any busi- 
ness, but, when they are not engaged in war or hunting, spend 
their whole time in loitering and feasting, committing the 
management of their houses, lands, and all their affairs to their 
women, old men, and children." This custom, which to the 
Roman seemed so strange and so contemptible, was doubtless 
but a relic of the earher mother age, when woman was not the 
dependent of, but the teacher and ruler of, man. Students of 
German mythology claim that from woman proceeded agricult- 
ure, medicine, tradition, and family life — from man, warfare 
xvn [ 8 ] 



WOMAN 

and hunting. Long before the father had become a member 
of the family group, the mother reigned supreme in the den, 
teaching to her children the knowledge she had acquired in her 
efforts to provide for herself and offspring. For a long period 
such property as there was descended through the mother, and 
the management of the houses, lands, and all the affairs per- 
taining to them was in all likehhood due, not to the indolence 
of the men, but to the fact that woman had not entirely given 
place to man as head of the household. 

The social customs which prevailed among the ancient 
Britons were in many respects similar to those of Germany. 
Both Germans and Britons lived in the semi-promiscuous 
fashion which seems to have led the Romans to form such a 
low estimate of their morals. Their houses consisted of but 
one apartment, which was shared by men, women, and children, 
who during the night rested on one continuous bed of rushes. 
This mode of life must have seemed exceedingly barbarous to 
the civihzed, luxurious Romans, but that the wives of the Britons 
were held in common, as is stated by Juhus Caesar, is, we con- 
sider, extremely doubtful. The treatment of Cartismandna, the 
adulterous queen of the Brigantes, whom her indignant sub- 
jects obhged to vacate the throne in favor of her injured husband, 
tends to induce the behef that they did not so Ughtly look upon 
the marriage bond, and that monogamy was practised by all 
classes of society. In Wales, however, wedlock was by no means 
indissoluble. There a man could divorce his wife upon very 
slight pretext, and a wife could separate from her husband for 
such a shght cause as a disagreeable breath. By the laws of 
Hoel Dda, who was a prince of that country in the tenth cen- 
tury, a man w^as allowed to give his wife three blows with a 
stick upon any part of the body except the head if she com- 
mitted adultery, if she squandered his means, if she pulled his 
beard, or "called him opprobrious names," but if the beating 
were more severe or for any more trifling reason, he was fined. 

It is difficult to determine what was the exact status of 
woman in every part of Britain in that olden time. By the 
law of regal succession a British king was succeeded by his 
daughter or by his widow, if he left no son. It was in this way 
that the famous Boadicea became Queen of the Iceni, 
xvu [9] 



WOMAN 

In the ordinary rank^f life a man's property was at his 
death divided equally among his sons. What share was ap- 
portioned to his daughters is not quite clear. Among the Saxons 
on the Continent it was customary for the daughters to receive 
a smaller share than their brothers. In like manner the laws 
of Wales in the tenth century decreed that a daughter receive 
but half as much as falls to her brother of their father's in- 
heritance. There is, however, a law of King Canute from 
which it appears that sons and daughters were made equal, as 
they may have been in even earlier times. 

Although the British woman was in many cases legally 
recognized as the equal of man, she was by no means considered 
fit to be her own guardian, but during her whole life was in the 
care of one of the opposite sex. While unmarried she was, of 
course, under the control of her father. At his death her 
brother took his place, or, if she had none, her nearest male rela- 
tive. The women who had no relations fell to the guardianship 
of the king. A married woman was under the legal control of 
her husband, provided that she had been married with the con- 
sent of her previous guardian, whose authority could not be 
taken from him without his consent. His compHance was 
usually gained by means of ample presents, sometimes so ample 
that it became necessary to pass a law fixing the amount for 
people of all ranks. The value of the presents varied not only 
according to the rank, but according to the condition of the 
woman, only half as much being paid in the case of a widow as 
was paid for a maiden of the same rank. The man who married 
without the consent of his bride's guardian had no legal 
authority over his wife nor any of her possessions, and had 
to suffer various severe penalties for his crime {mundhreach)^ 
for such it was reckoned. 

Marriage was celebrated with a great deal of festivity, 
although the ceremony was, like that of the Germans, of the 
simplest description. Among the guests were included all rela- 
tives within the third degree. Each guest was expected to give 
a present to the bride and bridegroom, and the latter also re- 
ceived a present from the guardian of the bride. This "fader- 
fium" was all the dowry which the husband received with his 
wife. On the morning after the marriage the bridegroom had 
XVII [ lO ] 



WOMAN 

to retaliate by presenting a valuable gift to his wife. This 
" morgaengif e " (morning gift) became her own separate prop- 
erty, to which she had exclusive right. 

The ancient British woman appears to have been as fond of 
dress as were her Continental sisters, the women of Gaul. 
Boadicea is described by Dio as wearing a short tunic of thick 
woollen cloth, over which was a long mantle reaching nearly to 
the ground. Massive gold ornaments were worn by both sexes, 
the gold chains of Caractacus and of Boadicea being thought 
worthy of special mention by the Roman historians. Luxuriant 
tresses were also esteemed "a thing of beauty," and the golden 
hair of the ill-fated Queen of the Iceni is said to have floated 
far down over her armor when engaged in battle. Indeed, 
it is evident, from all that we can learn of the women of the re- 
mote past, that they did not differ so widely from the women of 
the present day as the lapse of time would lead us to expect, 
and that, apart from outward circumstances, they were women 
"in all things like as we are." 



XVII [ II ] 



WOMAN 
MARRIAGE AND MODERN CIVILIZATION 

BY 

W. S. ULLY 

"A person is a man endowed with a civil status" (civili 
statu prcBditiis) was the definition of Latin jurisprudence. And 
this was the conception of personality which Christianity found 
in the Roman Empire, and transformed. Far other was its 
teaching as to personahty. Christianity revealed human nat- 
ure to itself, exhibiting man as self-conscious, self-determined, 
morally responsible ; as by his very nature invested with rights 
inalienable and imprescriptible, and encompassed with correla- 
tive duties; as lord of himself in the sacred domain of con- 
science, and accountable there only to Him whose perpetual 
witness conscience is. This was, in fact, a new principle of 
individuality. The individual of the later Roman jurisprudence 
was the citizen, just as the individual among the Germanic in- 
vaders of the decadent Empire was the member of the tribe. 
Slaves were regarded as mere things. Christianity vindicated 
the moral and spiritual freedom of men as men, proclaimed 
their universal brotherhood, and insisted that before their Crea- 
tor and Judge, rich and poor, bond and free, meet together in 
the essential equivalence of human personahty. Victor Hugo's 
picturesque saying is hterally true — truer even than he realized : 
"The first Tree of Liberty was that Cross on which Jesus Christ 
offered Himself in sacrifice for the liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity of mankind." 

So much as to the root idea of modern civilization : the idea 
of differentiating it from all other civihzations: the idea of 
human personahty. " Tm homo, tantum nomen si te scias^^ 
("How great, O man, is the name thou bearest, if thou only 
knewest!") said St. Augustine. But by this revelation of the 
dignity of human nature — I might say the sanctity, homo res 
sacra homini — the weaker half of humanity benefited far more 
than the stronger half. The proclamation of the spiritual 
equaUty of woman with man in the new order- — "In Jesus 
xvn [ 12 ] 



WOMAN 

Christ there is neither male nor female" — notwithstanding her 
natural subjection to him economically, brought about what 
may well appear the most wonderful part of the great change 
due to the influence of Christianity. The estate of woman in 
the Roman Empire has been pithily expressed by one of the 
most recent, and not the least authoritative, of its historians. 
"She was degraded in her social condition," writes Merivale, 
"because she was deemed unworthy of moral consideration; 
and her moral consideration, again, sank lower and lower pre- 
cisely because her social condition was so degraded." Among 
the Jews — and we must never forget that Christianity first came 
before the world as a Jewish sect — her place was no higher; 
indeed it was lower. Divorce was practised by the Hebrews 
to an extent unknown even in the lowest decadence of im- 
perial Rome. The text in Deuteronomy authorizing a man to 
put away his wife if he found in her some blemish (aliquant 
f(Bditalem, as the Vulgate has it) was interpreted most liberally 
by the Rabbis. Any cause of offence was sufficient, according 
to Hillel: for example, if a woman let the broth burn; and 
Akiva lays it down that a man might give his wife a bill of 
divorcement if he could find a better-looking spouse. Polyg- 
amy, too, was at the least tolerated, if it was not largely prac- 
tised ; indeed, it still survives among the Jews of the East, and 
did not disappear among those dwelling in the West until the 
prohibitory law of Rabbi Gershom ben Jehudah was passed 
in the Synod of Worms (a.d. 1020). 

But Christianity did more than merely vindicate the per- 
sonality of woman. It protected her personality by what a 
learned writer has well called "the new creation of marriage." 
There are few things in history more astonishing — we may say, 
in the strictest sense, miraculous — than the fact, for fact it is, 
that a few words spoken in Syria two thousand years ago by a 
Jewish peasant, "despised and rejected of men," brought about 
this vast change, which has wrought so much to purify and 
ennoble modern civiHzation ; surely an emphatic testimony to 
the truth of the Evangehst's assertion: "He knew what was 
in man." De Wette remarks, with his usual judiciousness. 
"Christ grounds wedlock on the original interdependence 
{Zusavimengehorigkeit) oi the two sexes, established by God, 
XVII [ 13 ] 



WOMAN 

and lays it down that, as or^^annot exist without the other, the 
inscparabihty of their union should follow. This union is, 
indeed, the work of man; but it takes place, and ever should 
take place, through an inner tendency (Drang), proceeding 
from the original interdependence of the sexes, through love. 
The separation, on the other hand, ... [of those who thus 
come together] takes place through human arbitrariness (Will- 
kur), or through lusts and passions which unfairly or incon- 
sistently annul what was ordained in conformity with the original 
law of Nature" ("was dem urspriinglichen Naturgesetze ge- 
mass gestif tet war ") . 

This is the Magna Charta of woman in modern civiHzation: 
this lifelong union of two equal personalities; this gift of one 
woman to one man as adjutorium simile sibi, a help like unto 
him — "not like to Hke, but Hke to difference"; a union, a gift, 
consecrated by religion and made holy matrimony. But I 
may observe in passing, Christianity did even more than this 
to secure the position of feminine humanity in that new order 
of society which it was to mould. Soon — hov,' soon the Cata- 
combs bear witness — the type of womanhood idealized in the 
Virgin Mother assumed a prominent place in the devotions of 
the faithful; and as this idea germinated in the Christian con- 
sciousness, Mary received a worship inferior only to that offered 
to her Son. The conception presented by the Madonna would 
have been fooHshness to the antique Greeks, and Romans too. 
It was a stumbling-block to the Jews, contemptuous of the 
daughters of her who figures so poorly in the account received 
by them "of man's first disobedience and the fruit of that for- 
bidden tree." The Christian Church, from the earliest times, 
delighted to think of Mary as the second Eve, who had undone 
the work of the first, and had brought life instead of death into 
the world, mutans Eva nomen; changing the name of the temp- 
tress into the "Ave" of the angeHc salutation. And when a 
thousand years had passed away, and chivalry arose, the "all 
but adoring love " of Christians for her, powerfully stimulated 
the quasi- rehgious veneration paid in the Middle Ages to the 
graces of feminine nature, a veneration which^ striking a note 
before unheard in the world, has inspired the highest poetry of 
modern civiHzation. Such was the influence exercised on the 
XVII [ 14 ] 



WOMAN 

place of her sex in the new order of society by "the Mother of 
fair love, and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope." "Born of 
a woman" is the true account of the modern home, with its re- 
fined and elevating influences. That is the characteristic spe- 
cially marking off the Christian family from the other families 
of the earth. It is founded on woman, not on man. 

We must, however, remember that the conception of matri- 
mony, which was so powerfully to affect modern civiHzation — 
for that is my immediate theme — was not fully and firmly es- 
tabhshed for centuries. Lotze excellently observes : "The rela- 
tion of Christianity toward the external condition of mankind 
was not that of a disturbing and subversive force. But it de- 
prived evil of all justification for permanent continuance . . . 
when the spirit of Christian faith made itself felt in the relations 
of life." The Church at the beginning accepted, generally, the 
marriage customs prevaiHng in the Roman Empire. The 
Christian bride, like her pagan sisters, wore the long white robe 
with the purple fringe, the yellow veil, the girdle which the 
bridegroom was to unloose. The ring, the coronation — still 
retained in the Eastern Church — the joining of hands, contin- 
ued to beautify the nuptial rite for the votaries of the new faith. 
But for them it was hallowed by a prayer of benediction, offered 
by a bishop or priest ; and, sometimes, by the Eucharistic Sacri- 
fice. Again, the Church, like the Roman legists, recognizes 
the essence of marriage as residing in the free consent of the 
man and woman contracting it. But from the first she regarded 
it as something more than a contract — as a state of life divinely 
ordained for ends of the natural order, but hallowed by a super- 
natural significance into an august mystery of rehgion. And 
therefore she utterly rejected the view which she found preva- 
lent in the Roman Empire, that, as it had been contracted by 
mutual consent, so by mutual consent it might be dissolved. 
From the first she insisted upon its permanency as well as upon 
its unity.^ So much is absolutely certain. But was it possible 

^ And a second marriage, after the death of either, was regarded with 
much disfavor, as it still is in the Greek Church. Athenagoras calls it 
" a decent adultery" ; Clement of Alexandria, " fornication." St. Greg- 
ory Nazianzen, while conceding to the bigamist " pardon and indulg- 
ence," terms a third marriage " iniquity," and pronounces that he who 
exceeds that number is "manifestly bestial." St. Jerome allows that 

XVII [15] 



WOMAN 

for this sacrosanct bond tol^dissolved in its essential character? 
It is quite clear that the early Church never held as lawful the 
remarriage of either husband or wife during the Ufetime of 
either, if separated for any other cause than adultery. It is 
equally clear that on the question whether, if adultery did in- 
vaUdate the bond, both the innocent and the guilty party, or 
either of them, might remarry, the Church gave no certain 
sound for long centuries. The balance of authority among her 
weightiest teachers is against all such remarriage. But they 
are divided in opinion ; nay, some of the greatest of them waver 
in their judgment, incUning now to one side, now to the other. 
Gradually the loftier and sterner view of the Christian con- 
cept was apprehended in the West, and maintained by the 
Roman Pontiffs,^ though not till the opening Middle Ages was 
the absolute indissolubiUty of marriage, when once rightly con- 
tracted, save by the death of one of the contracting parties, 
firmly established in the canon law. It is the doctrine set forth 
by Gratian, whose Decretum (a.d. 1140), a work of supreme 
authority, is the basis of the Corpus Juris Canonici; and from 
his time to our own it has been universally accepted throughout 
the Catholic Church. 

It is a true saying that a man is formed at the knees of his 
mother. The kind of men found in a civihzation depends 
upon the kind of women found in it. The ethos of society — 
what Burke called "the moral basis" — is determined by women. 
And their goodness or badness, as our very language bears 
witness, depends upon their purity. That is the root of all 
feminine virtues, and the source of a people's genuine greatness. 
Renan's saying is so true as to be almost a truism: "La force 
d'une nation c'est la pudeur de ses femmes." And the great 

those who contract more than one marriage may remain in the Church, 
but on sufferance only, and likens them to the unclean beasts in Noah's 
ark. 

^ Even so late as a.d. 726 Pope Gregory the Second, in a letter to 
St, Boniface, while recommending that a man whose wife's health for- 
bade conjugal intercourse should not marry again, left him free to do so 
provided he maintained her. Gratian remarks that this concession " is 
altogether opposed to the sacred canons; nay, even to the Evangelical 
and Apostolic doctrine." It is certainly opposed to the view taken by 
all Gregory's successors in the Roman See, and, so far as we know, by 
all his predecessors. 

xvn [ 16 ] 



WOMAN 

bulwark of woman's chastity is the absolute character of 
matrimony. 

We owe, then, to the severe teaching of the Catholic Church 
that institution of indissoluble monogamy which, more than 
anything else, marks off our modern civilization from all other 
civilizations. It is matter of history, over which we need not 
linger, how unflinchingly the CathoHc Church * has upheld the 
integrity of that institution throughout the ages. Nor need we 
examine the arguments adduced by her divines in support of it. 
I may, however, make an observation on the criticism to which 
one of those arguments is manifestly open. Theological writers, 
when maintaining that indissoluble monogamy is divinely in- 
stituted — and surely with reason, for it issues from the divinely 
ordained nature of things in their ethical relations — have been 
confronted with the obvious difficulty presented by the practice 
of Hebrew patriarchs and kings, of acknowledged sanctity, 
with whom they claimed solidarity. Their favorite expedient 
for meeting this difficulty is the hypothesis that a Divine dis- 
pensation for polygamy was granted to the human race from 
the time of the flood associated with that familiar figure of our 
childhood, the Noachian ark, and was revoked by Christ. It 
is objected that they do not disclose the manner in which this 
stupendous indulgence was proclaimed to mankind, or explain 
why knowledge of its summary cancellation was withheld from 
the countless milhons affected thereby. The objectors do not 
understand that theological fictions, like legal, have their proper 
office in certain stages of social evolution, as necessary stepping- 
stones on which our race rises to higher things. 

But, as a matter of fact, the institution of marriage in our 
modern civiUzation rests, not on argument, but on authority. 
The nations to which the Catholic Church taught the doctrine 
of Christ did not heckle their teacher; they received her as the 
prophet of God, and believed her on her bare word. The great 

^ It cannot be too emphatically stated that, in the Catholic Church, 
divorce, in the modern sense of the word — the dissolution of the mar- 
riage bond — is never sfranted, and is never recognized. The common 
phrase, " the divorce of Henry the Eighth," has given rise to much 
popular misapprehension It was not a divorce, as the term is now 
understood, but a declaration of nullity, which Henry the Eighth 
sought, and the Holy See refused. 

xvn [ 17 j 



WOMAN 

religious revolution of tW sixteenth century is congruously- 
termed Protestanism. Its imitators differed widely upon a great 
many matters. But Henry the Eighth and Luther, Calvin 
and Zwingli, Knox and Miinzer, however varying their private 
judgments in things theological, were all agreed in protesting 
against the authority of the Pope, and in substituting for it their 
own. And when the authority of the Apostolic See was cast 
ofT, much of the doctrine and discipline which it upheld was 
mutilated. The doctrine and disciphne of marriage did not 
escape this fate. In England, indeed, though the schism arose 
from the refusal of the Sovereign Pontiff to prostitute Christian 
matrimony to the lust of a tyrant, the institution itself was 
left intact.^ This, it may be observed in passing, was by no 
means due to Cranmer. His own history, perhaps, sufficiently 
explains his aversion from the CathoHc doctrine of marriage. 
At all events, it is abundantly clear that he was as willing to relax 
the nuptial bond for the world in general as to cancel it for his 
master. The legislation on divorce which he proposed to sub- 
stitute, in the Reformatio Le gum Ecclesiasticarum, for the Catholic 
law might have satisfied even Luther, whose practice is suf- 
ficiently indicated by his own marriage, and by the dispensation 
for polygamy given by him to the Landgrave PhiHp of Hesse. 
The earUer generations of the Lutheran sect appear to have 
followed its founder's views concerning the relations of the sexes 
haud passihus cequis. From the first, indeed, it allowed divorce 
for adultery and mahcious desertion, as did also the sect founded 
by Calvin. But it was not until the eighteenth century that 
the dissolution of the matrimonial tie was accorded by Protestant 
consistories for such reasons as " uncongeniahty," "irreconcil- 
able enmity," and the like. In fact, as Protestantism developed, 
the pronouncements of its pundits concerning the bond of 
marriage became laxer. Nor was this laxity confined to its 
more rationalistic forms. Even the greatest of the Puritans, 
John Milton, in that masterpiece of eloquence, erudition, and 
invective. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, "pushes the 

* In theory, but not in practice. Between the Reformation and the 
establishment of the Divorce Court (ad. 1857) many marriages were 
dissolved by Act of Parliament, the Anglican bishops not protesting 
and in some cases expressly consenting. 

XVII L 18 ] 



WOMAN 

Protestant license," to borrow the phrase of his editor, very far. 
The position which he sets himself to establish is "that indis- 
position, unfitness, and contrariety of mind, arising from a 
cause in nature unchangeable, hindering and ever Hkely to 
hinder the main benefits of conjugal society, which are solace 
and peace, is a greater reason of divorce than natural frigidity, 
especially if there be no children, and that there be mutual 
consent." 

This was, substantially, the position taken by the publicists 
of the French Revolution — the second Act in that great Euro- 
pean drama which opened with the Protestant Reformation. 
Of course the foulness which they preached in their crusade 
against Christianity would have been rejected with horror by 
Milton's God-fearing soul. Purity they regarded as "a new 
disease brought into the world by Christ"; modesty as "a vir- 
tue fastened on with pins" ; holy matrimony as " a superstitious 
servitude." And their legislation, when they obtained the power 
to legislate, was the faithful expression of these opinions. Their 
great "reform" was to reduce marriage to a civil contract, ter- 
minable by the consent of the contracting parties. Other 
grounds of divorce enumerated by their law of 1792 were in- 
sanity, desertion, absence, emigration, and incompatibility of 
temper on the allegation of either husband or wife. The 
measure seems to have been successful beyond the expectation 
of its authors. During the twenty-seven months following its 
enactment six thousand marriages were dissolved in Paris alone, 
and in the year 1797 the divorces actually outnumbered the 
marriages. Duval, in his Souvenirs Thermidoriens, tells us : 

"People divorced one another with the least provocation; 
nay, they divorced without any provocation, and with no more 
ado than they would have made for an expedition to gather 
lilacs in the meadows of Saint- Gervais, or to eat cherries at 
Montmorency. The husband had a mistress, and was tired of 
his wife ; the wife had a lover, and desired nothing better than 
to be rid of her husband. They informed one another of the 
state of the case, set out together for the city hall, acquainted 
the mayor that they could no longer bear each other, and on 
the same day, or the next, the divorce was granted for incom- 
patibility of temper. And the children — ^what became of them ? 
XVII [ 19 ] 



WOMAN 

What did it matter? Th^^ouses were free from one another; 
the most important thing was achieved. Moreover, it was not 
rare, on account of the ease with which marriages could be dis- 
solved, to find couples who had been divorced five or six times 
in as many months. Occasionally very ludicrous things hap- 
pened. Once two couples acted after the manner of La Fon- 
taine's Troqueurs, that is to say, they arranged an exchange of 
husband and wife among themselves : and the two couples were 
on such good terms that the double-wedding breakfast was 
held at their joint expense." 

The Napoleonic Code somewhat curbed this bestiality, and, 
at the Restoration, the old Catholic marriage legislation was 
reinstated in France. But the Third Republic has rcenacted 
divorce by the law of the 27th of July, 1884, carried by the per- 
sistent endeavors of M. Naquet, a measure which, though going 
beyond the corresponding legislation in England, is less licentious 
than the law of the First RepubUc. 

The French Revolution is the immediate source of a number 
of sophisms concerning man and society which have worked 
their way into popular favor throughout Europe during the last 
century, and now tyrannize as shibboleths. They are, one and 
all, underlain by that spurious individuaUsm which is of the 
essence of Rousseau's teaching, and which the Revolution, 
happily described by Burke as "an armed doctrine," endeavored 
to translate into fact. The atomism, real or imaginary, of cer- 
tain unstable tribes in the lowest stages of civilization, was for 
Rousseau the true ideal of the family. It is a false ideal; but 
it is the ideal which so-called Liberalism has persistently en- 
deavored to realize. There can be no doubt that the attack 
on the permanency of marriage throughout Europe, which has 
already been crowned with so much success, is an outcome of 
this ideal — an ideal essentially anarchic. When the Divorce 
Court was established in England, that sagacious publicist 
Le Play — whose writings, I fear, are hardly known in this 
country — saw in it "a symptom of the decline of public morahty; 
"elle affaiblit," he observed, "dans I'esprit de la nation le 
principe de I'ordre sup^rieur." But, of course, what has been 
accomplished here by the opponents of indissoluble marriage, 
falls far short of their achievements elsewhere. In Germany, 
xvn [ 20 ] 



WOMAN 

"insuperable aversion" is recognized as a ground for divorce; 
so is "hopeless insanity," or "malignant inconsistency," or 
" quarrelsomeness," or " a disorderly mode of life," or " drunken- 
ness," or "extravagance." In Sweden, "hatred, ill-will, prod- 
igality, drunkenness, or a violent temper " suffices. The 
Protestants of Austria may divorce one another for "violent dis- 
like." In Switzerland, "marriage relations greatly strained" 
are recognized as a valid reason for dissolving the marriage. 
But in the last-mentioned country a still further "reform" is 
desired by the party of "progress," and an appeal, by way of 
referendum, to the "yea and no of general ignorance" is con- 
templated, with a view of legalizing divorce whenever "a pro- 
found disorganization" of such relations occurs. 

The American courts take a very liberal view of cruelty. 
It appears that they have granted divorce to a petitioning wife 
on this ground when her husband "did not wash himself, there- 
by inflicting great mental anguish on her"; when "he accused 
her sister of stealing, thereby sorely wounding her feelings"; 
when, "after twenty-seven years of marriage, he said: * You are 
old and worn out; I do not want you any longer' "; when "he 
would not cut his toenails, and she was scratched severely 
every night"; when "he persisted in the use of tobacco, thereby 
aggravating sick headaches, to which she was subject." A 
petitioning husband, on the other hand, has obtained from 
them the dissolution of his marriage for such instances of 
cruelty as the following: when "his wife pulled him out of bed 
by the whiskers"; when "she upbraided him, and said: 'You 
are no man at all, ' thereby causing him mental suffering and 
anguish"; when "she refused to keep his clothes in repair, 
and even to cook, and never sewed on his buttons"; when "she 
struck him a violent blow with her bustle." 

This is the condition into which the institution of marriage 
has already come in modern civilization. And the causes to 
which this is due are yet working, and with ever-increasing 
activity. Materialism, disguised and undisguised, is the fashion- 
able philosophy of the day.^ It is fatal to the idea of human 
personality, and, consequently, to the spiritual prerogatives of 

I For the proof of this statement I must refer the reader to Chapter 1. 
and to the Appendix in my work On Right and Wrong. 
XVII [ 21 ] 



WOMAN 

woman. It means to her,^ Dean Merivale has well observed 
in his striking Lectures on the Conversion oj the Northern Na- 
tions, from which I quoted in an earher portion of this paper, 
"a fall from the consideration she now holds among us." It 
means that she must "descend again to be the mere plaything 
of man, the transient companion of his leisure hours, to be held 
loosely, as the chance gift of a capricious fortune." 

Such transient companionship, such loose holding, appear to 
many careful observers the substitute for Christian marriage 
which will be found in the world as Christianity becomes gener- 
ally discredited; a consummation which they deem imminent. 
To quote at length even the more considerable of contemporary 
publicists who have expressed this view, would take me far 
beyond my present limits. I can here cite only a very few 
words from three of them. Mr. Karl Pearson, in his learned 
and able work. The Ethic oj Free Thought, writes: "Legalized 
life monogamy is, in human history, a thing but of yesterday; 
and no unprejudiced person can suppose it a final form. A 
new sex relationship will replace the old. Both as to matter 
and form it ought to be a pure question of taste, a simple matter 
of agreement between the man and woman." Mr. Pearson, 
in his most suggestive volume, National Life and Character, 
holds that as "the religion of the State" replaces Christianity, 
which he thinks it is swiftly and surely doing, it will be "im- 
possible to maintain indissoluble marriage," and "the tie be- 
tween husband and wife" will "come to be easily variable, 
instead of permanent." Similarly, Mr. H. G. Wells, in the 
singularly interesting Anticipations, with which he has just 
favored the world, deems it "impossible to ignore the forces 
making for a considerable relaxation of the institution of per- 
manent monogamous marriage in the coming years," and holds 
it "foolish not to anticipate and prepare for a state of things 
when not only will moral standards be shifting and uncertain, 
admitting of physiologically sound menages of very variable 
status, but also when vice and depravity, in every form that is 
not absolutely penal, will be practised in every grade of mag- 
nificence, and condoned." 

I own I think this prognostication of the return of modern 
civilization to "the morals of the poultry yard" well warranted 

XVII [ 22 ] 



WOMAN 

by the signs of the times. It rests, indeed, upon the assump- 
tion that the revolution in the relations of the sexes, steadily 
progressing since the destruction of the religious unity of Europe, 
will continue unchecked. Whether that assumption is correct 
"only the event will teach us, in its hour." Of course we must 
not forget that human affairs seldom advance for very long in a 
straight line. " Incst in rebus humanis quidam circulus." The 
future rarely corresponds with the forecasts of even the wisest. 
Still, as we look around the world, it is impossible not to recog- 
nize the strength of the forces which militate against marriage. 
I know well that we cannot count reason among them. The 
human reason, properly disciplined and correctly exercised, 
is capable of ascertaining the ethical principles necessary to 
enable man to arrive at his natural ideal — the harmonious de- 
velopment of all his powers in a complete and consistent whole. 
And from these principles is derived the true norm of matri- 
mony so well expressed by the great jurisconsult of ancient 
Rome: "Conjunctio maris et feminae est consortium omnis 
vitae; divini et humani juris communicatio." A state of life 
involving the fusion of two personalities, and fraught with con- 
sequences most momentous to both, and to society, its unity 
and indissolubihty issue from the nature of things in their 
ethical relations. 

The only real witness in the world for the absolute character 
of holy matrimony is the Catholic Church. And whether men 
will hear, or whether — as seems more likely — they will forbear, 
she warns them that to degrade indissoluble marriage to a mere 
dissoluble contract, to a mere regulation of social police, to- a 
mere material fact governed by the animal, not the rational, 
nature, will be to throw back modern civilization to that wallow- 
ing in the mire from which she rescued it. 



XVII [ 23 ] 



XVIII 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

"THE ESSENTIAL EQUALITY OF MAN AND WOMAN" 

BY 

FRANCES POWER COBBE 

AND 

WILLIAM K. HILL 



I~\ ISMISSING the moral side of the problem of woman in 
■'-^ her relations with man, we turn now to its practical 
aspect. What is woman's position in the world to-day, and what 
is it like to he in the immediate future ? This, in every public 
woman's mind, hurls us at once upon the question of woman suf- 
frage, or ^^ universal suffrage^' as many of its advocates prefer 
to call it. Any vehemently argued issue is perhaps better wider - 
stood by viewing it from a distance; and so we have purposely 
dealt with this agitated theme, not as it presents itself to any one 
of its supporters hi America, but as it strikes our English cousins. 
Frances Power Cobbe has long been a leading name among woman 
suffragists. A granddaughter of Archbishop Cobbe, of Dublin, 
Miss Cobbe early became a leader in religious circles, and in her 
own career has exemplified the principles for which she stands, 
being widely known as a lecturer, an author, and a journalist. 
The following address was 'first delivered by her before the Ladies^ 
Club in Clifton. 

Lest her view of the matter might be thought one-sided we 
supplement it with a discussion by a ^^mere man,'' who ap- 
proaches the subject in its broader aspect. Going beyond "suf- 
frage" Mr. Hill inquires as to the equalities and inequalities of 
the sexes, mental, moral, and physical. He even attempts to 
strike a scientific balance and deduce results. 
XVIII [ I ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

There are two sides from which we may regard the woman- 
suffrage demand : the Just^oi it and the Expediency of it. 

I am one of those who would always place the former in the 
foreground, for I believe with Cicero that "nothing is right 
because it is expedient, but it is expedient because it is right." 
When we have ascertained the righteousness of any line of ac- 
tion, public or private, we may be pretty sure that, in God's 
world, it will turn out sooner or later to have been the ex- 
pedient course; if not in the lower sense and connected with 
our baser interests, yet in the higher, connected with those in 
which the happiness and honor of human life consist. 

Now as regards the Justice of the claim of women to the 
franchise, we must of course admit at starting that the whole 
idea of representative government is a modern one, and that 
the abstract idea of justice — what Kant would call "a Law fit 
for Law Universal" — is difficult of application to it. We might 
have lived still under a government at any stage between a 
Greek democracy, where every man has his own representative 
in the market-place, and a Russian autocracy, where the Auto- 
crat may say like Louis XIV., Uetat c'est moi. But as we 
stand now in the twentieth century in England, it would seem 
that {where men are concerned) two principles are almost uni- 
versally accepted as just — namely, that those who are called 
on to obey the laws should have a voice in making them; and 
that those who pay taxes should have a voice in their expenditure. 

These two principles, I remark, are almost universally ac- 
cepted as just, jor men. Very few people will refuse to admit 
that they are so. But why then, I ask, are they not to be held 
just likewise, and equally, where women are concerned? We 
too are called upon to obey the laws. Why should not we have 
a voice in making them? We too (alas!) are called upon to 
pay taxes. Why should not we have a word to say about their 
expenditure? This is our contention. That what is just for 
the gander would also be just for the goose ! At least the onus 
of proving that it is not so lies with our opponents. 

Of course the real origin and still existing source of this 
failure of justice is the old, old story of the subjection of the 
weak to the strong — the inevitable, and (not blamable) omnip- 

XVIII [ 2 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

otence of men in times when Might made Right; and a 
natural survival of the old state of masculine overbearing under 
happier and softer conditions, in the minds both of men and 
women. It is an idee fixe with both sexes that men should 
rule, and women be ruled. But now, surely, the time has come 
when the problem may be regarded dispassionately and with- 
out prejudice by both parties, and the question pressed home: 
Why, if it be just to give men, who have to obey the laws and 
pay taxes, a voice in making the laws and expending the taxes, 
is it not also just to give the same voice to women who have to 
do both, the same as they ? 

I apprehend that very few, even of the sternest opponents 
of our claims, will attempt to dispute them on these abstract 
grounds of justice pur et simple. But they will say that, where 
public interests are concerned, other things must be taken into 
consideration beside abstract and theoretic justice; and that 
the weakness of women renders them by nature unfit to take 
part in government or public affairs; that their inclusion in 
the constituencies would water doivn the political life of the 
nation and weaken the constitution; and that there are other 
objects to which their whole attention should be given — namely, 
to housekeeping and baby- rearing. 

Now let us face this argument from the inferiority of women 
frankly. It is true! Women, on the whole, are intellectually 
as well as physically less strong than men. That is, if we set 
up almost any standard of ability or genius or erudition, we 
shall find a good many more men than women attain to it. 
The highest standard of all no woman has ever yet reached; 
and accordingly we have been contemptuously taunted with 

the question : 

"Where is your Hamlet, your Macbeth, 
Your soul-wrought victories? " 

''Nowhere," I cheerfully answer, unless poor Sappho 
(whom Aristotle ranks alongside of Homer and ^Eschylus) at- 
tained it; and her works (all the nine books save a few frag- 
ments!) men have, unfortunately, managed to lose. I have 
also recently learned that many of the hymns in the Rig Veda 
are by female Rishis. That these are absolutely Divine is the 
XVIII [ 3 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

belief of all Brahmins. I bmscss an idol of Brahma the Creator, 
which represents him as nolding the four Vedas in his four 
hands, and reading them with his four heads. Think of the 
chief God of the Trimurti reading a woman's writing ! * 

But now arises the question: Has the possession of genius 
sufficient to write "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" anything to do 
with the exercising of the voting power in the United Kingdom 
as at present constituted ? 

If it be so, then the whole Celtic population would be justly 
disfranchised, for there has never been a Celtic Shakespeare, 
or Homer, or Dante, or Milton, any more than there has been 
a woman of the same exalted intellectual rank. But if no one 
would dream of urging this deficiency against a good Scotch, 
Welsh, or Irish farmer as a reason why he should not cast a 
vote for the candidate he prefers at his county election, is it not 
ridiculous to use it as a reason for refusing the same franchise 
to us women? The same argument apphcs in the still higher 
field of philosophy. There has never been a female Plato or 
Kant. But neither has there been a Celtic Plato or Kant. 

There would be some fairness in arguments on this line if 
some intellectual test, high or low, were made the condition 
of ability to vote for a member of Parliament. In that case it 
might be a proportionately small number of women who would 
reach it. But there would be some; and that would end the 
injustice of the present state of things. 

But admitting frankly the inferiority of our sex as regards 
great epics and tragedies and systems of philosophy, we must 
here put in a pertinent question: Whether women have proved 
themselves Ukewise inferior in that gift — power, faculty — what- 
ever we may call it, which alone concerns the question in hand ? 
Are women bad politicians, bad administrators, incapable nat- 
urally of understanding and guiding aright our ship of state ? 
I will tell my reasons for urging this question. 

I possess at home two heavy volumes of tables of ancient 

* The Psalm which says: "The Lord gave the Word, great was the 
company of the preachers," ought (I am informed by the best Hebrew 
scholars) to be translated : " The Lord gave the Word. The heraldesses 
who proclaimed it were a great host." 

XVIII [ 4 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

and modern history, in which I noted down (in my long-past 
studious youth) all the sovereigns of all the countries concern- 
ing which I was able to glean any information; using a Uttle 
system of my own for showing at a glance their descents and 
successions. It occurred to me some time ago to count over 
the names in these tables; and I found there were more than 
2,500 men sovereigns on record — kings and emperors; and of 
these a proportion of something like 5 per cent, were to be ranked 
as "eminent" or "illustrious" rulers, according to Mr. Francis 
Galton's definitions. 

Among them, at long intervals, in almost every country 
appeared also Queens, numbering altogether 51. But in that 
half hundred, nearly half were indisputably "eminent" or 
"illustrious"; some of them the best rulers which their coun- 
tries ever possessed. We cannot enter far into this inquiry 
(I have often begged my hterary friends to undertake it care- 
fully), but I will just name a few out of the small number of 
women who have ever reigned as independent sovereigns, and 
ask the reader to consider whether they do not stand out lus- 
trously in the pages of history ? ^ 

1 must begin in order of time (even if modem investigation 
leaves them as half-mythical personages,) with the great Semir- 
AMis, and her successor (after five generations) Nitocris of 
Babylon. Both of these queens are credited by Herodotus 
with vast works of pubHc beneficence connected with the great 
Rivers; and the former, Diodorus says, "traversed all parts of 
the vast Assyrian Empire, erecting great cities and stupendous 
monuments, and opening roads through savage mountains." 
Nitocris, Herodotus describes, as building a sort of draw- 
bridge over the Euphrates, and making other great works. 

After a second Nitocris (called in the Turin Papyrus 
Netagerti), Queen of Egypt, who is said to have wreaked a 
fearful retribution on her brother's murderers and then to have 
buried herself ahve;^ we come at last to firm grounds of history 

iMany of the 51 above counted as Queens-Regnant were the 
daughters of preceding sovereigns, married to their successors, and 
practically not more independent rulers than other Queens-Consort. 

2 See History of Egypt by Flinders Petrie, Vol. I., p. 105. 

XVIII [ 5 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

in the actual movements offne glorious reign of Queen Hatepsu 
(or more properly Hatshepsut) at Dcir-el-Bahri, and the great 
obelisks at Karnak. It is Httle to say to those who have studied 
these monuments, and the wondrous story of her Embassy to 
the Land of Punt, that Queen Hatepsu was one of the most 
enlightened princes of the ancient world, and one of the grandest 
of the mighty Pharaohs. 

Again we find Deborah among the Judges; a woman 
whose generalship saved Israel from the tyranny of Jabin, and 
secured peace for the land for forty years; and whose "Song" 
remains to us (as recent criticism avers) the most ancient frag- 
ment of Hebrew Scripture. Again we find Artemisia, the 
heroine of Salamis, who alone saved her ships in that disastrous 
battle, and for whose life the (not very chivalrous!) Athenians 
offered a reward of 10,000 drachmas because they "could not 
bear to be beaten by a woman"; also the second Artemisia, 
of Halicarnassus, who built to her husband's memory the sub- 
lime Mausoleum, which has been ever since the archetype of 
noble funeral monuments. 

Again: Zenobia, the magnificent and illustrious Queen of 
Palmyra, the friend of Longinus, of whom her conqueror, 
Aurelian (who so meanly compelled her to adorn his triumph) 
said that he had "never encountered so brave and resolute a 
foe." 

Passing to the Western world we have our own British 
BoADiCEA defying all the power of Rome, and, when she could 
do so no longer, killing herself to escape capture. Later on, 
Margaret, Queen of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, reached, 
as we read, by her great ability as a sovereign and diplomatist, 
"a degree of power unequalled in Europe since Charlemagne." 
Isabella IL, Queen of Castile, to whose discernment of the 
genius of Columbus the world owes the discovery of America. 
Our own Queen Elizabeth, of whose greatness it is needless 
to speak; Maria Theresa, of Austria, of whom we read that 
she "made great financial reforms," and that in her reign "Agri- 
culture, Manufacture and Commerce flourished, and the na- 
tional revenue greatly increased." Catherine II. , of Russia, 
no doubt a bad woman, but not perhaps a very bad Empress, 
XVIII [ 6 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

to whom it is noticeable that, alone of all female sovereigns, 
the title of ^' Great" has been appropriated! Then we have 
the present mysterious Empress of China — "She" — who, 
whether innocent, or a monster of cruelty and craft, is probably 
the ablest living person, man or woman, among the four hun- 
dred milUons of the Celestial Empire. And lastly, and greatest 
and best of all. Queen Victoria of England. Few will be 
found to say that this true Woman — fond wife, tender mother, 
kind and sympathizing friend to all who suffered — was not at 
least as good a poHtician as any male voter in her dominions, 
nay, perhaps as any of her illustrious subjects in the great 
** Victorian Age" which bears her name. Yet Queen Victoria 
was not "a genius." Her simple books show no trace of an 
intellect, or an imagination, which could have composed a 
Hamlet, or a Macbeth, or a Paradise Lost; still less a Phcedo, 
or a Kritik der reinen Vernunft. She was, in short, a "mere 
woman"; we might say a typical, duty-loving woman. But 
nevertheless she was (quite indisputably) a first-rate Statesman ! 

Thus I think we may fairly contend that if, in any branch of 
human intelHgence, women are the equals of men, it is pre- 
cisely in the one from which they are carefully excluded by law, 
unless they happen to be born princesses! Then, indeed, they 
are placed at the top of the constitution; and for sixty years 
we never hear a complaint of their incapacity for poHtics. 

Where then, I ask, can be found any plea of justice for ex- 
cluding our whole sex from the very simplest and smallest of 
political rights, when in that field at all events we have been 
proved to possess at least equal faculty with men ? What right 
have our legislators to continue to classify for this important 
purpose every living woman — blameless as to crime, and of 
full age to form a soHd judgment — as if she were of necessity 
by nature always a pauper, an idiot, a criminal, or a minor ? 

The refusal to us of Parliamentary votes is assuredly a rank 
injustice, and it practically involves a score of other injustices 
resulting from our unrepresented position, which causes our 
interests inevitably to go to the wall. We demand therefore 
in all seriousness and earnestness that this injustice be done 
away with in the United Kingdom, as it has been done away 
XVIII [ 7 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

with in our Southern Coronics, and in the Isle of Man, with 
none but beneficial results to the whole community.^ 

But now let us turn from the painful and, I confess, to me, 
irritating subject of the Injustice of which we complain in the 
refusal to us of the suffrage on the same terms as men, and 
consider for a few pleasant moments what may happen if the 
sense of justice in men ever rise high enough to induce them 
to grant us our natural rights. We have no means to force 
this concession on men. That is our misfortune. We have no 
pou sto from which to work, and sorely we have wanted one! 
But I bchcve in the universal progress of all humanity; and 
that the day will come when the difference of the constitution 
which stands between us will appear (as in truth it is) abso- 
lutely unreasonable and absurd, and the expediency of granting 
to us women the Parliamentary suffrage will become manifest, 

I am persuaded that the right of voting (small as it seems) 
will carry with it (if we ever obtain it) a great intellectual and 
moral uplifting of women. We are all — men and women — 
subject to a law of our nature which I have described elsewhere 
as the Contagion 0} the Emotions; and to be despised is, in all 
but the very strongest natures, to despise ourselves. Now the 
refusal to us of the franchise in its present largely extended 
area is to deconsider us ; to place us in an inferior category from 
even very ignorant and low-class men. It is degrading to our 
whole sex, qua sex; and it is impossible for any of us who are 
of an age and pecuniary position in which we should have 
votes if we were men, not to feel this, and to recognize that, 

* The following is a letter testifying to this fact from my friend Dr. 
John Ellis McTaggart, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who is 
married to a New Zealand lady : 

" So I jot down the following conclusions in which we both agree : — 

( 1 ) The Colony is completely satisfied with it. 

(2) The percentage of women who vote is smaller, but only 
slightly smaller, than the percentage of men. 

(3) Neither political party has gained by it — the women ap- 
parently dividing themselves in the same proportions as the men 
between the two parties. 

(4) It has substantially, but not overwhelmingly, strengthened 
the temperance vote." 

XVIII [ 8 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

in the judgment of our fellow-countrymen, we are an inferior 
class of beings. This comes home to us more in the country 
than in a town, for there we are directly confronted with mas- 
culine privileges. Our own farmers, our servants, our very 
laborers, be they never so ignorant and stupid, have a voice 
in elections while we have none. It is all very well for men 
to glorify womanhood in prose and verse, and treat us with 
special courtesy, and even to worship the Madonna! At 
bottom most men feel to us as we do to children ; and this acts 
most injuriously on our own characters in making us childish. 

Now if we can obtain votes men will begin to adopt a dif- 
ferent tone toward us, for they will want to interest us in their 
poHtics. It will not be a rapid change on their side or on our 
own; but it is bound to come in time. They will also seek 
more often the society of women who, as we all know, are apt 
to be a good deal left to themselves when they happen to be 
widows, or old maids, without any very special attractions. It 
is in every way desirable that the two sexes should frequently 
converse freely together, to the strengthening and enlarging the 
minds of women (and even putting animal spirits and pluck 
into them) ; and, we may hope, on the other side, to the soften- 
ing and purifying of the minds of men. If I had the choice 
of associating only with women, or only with men, I should 
have no hesitation in preferring women's society. But, as the 
children say, '^Both is best" and there is always a loss when 
men never converse with women or women never converse 
with men. You know what George EHot says, "The mascu- 
line mind — ivhat there is of it — is always of a superior order!" 
I should always advocate every plan bringing us into common 
work and play — to sit on committees together and unite as 
much as possible in all pubHc action. I even took on myself 
once to tell the lady Principal of one of our new colleges for 
women at Oxford, that I thought she ought to be a married 
woman with a husband who would sit at the head of the dinner 
table every day and lead the conversation! I beUeve it would 
be an excellent arrangement ; better for the students than many 
a course of Lectures. 

Many of my readers must have noticed the different nuance 
xvni [9] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

in the talk of English armroi American gentlemen to women. 
In America, though the women have not as yet votes, except 
in a few States, they have attained a different social position 
from that which we hold in England: and consequently an 
American man talks up to us; very visibly taking it for granted 
that we know as much and have as good a judgment of the sub- 
ject in hand as himself. An Englishman on the contrary 
usually talks down to us. He assumes that we know httle or 
nothing; and that our opinions (if we have any) are hardly 
worth ascertaining. This he does pretty universally to ladies 
who are strangers to him. Only if he happen to know that the 
woman to whom he is speaking is the possessor of brains, he 
is apt to treat her in a still more aggravating manner, and to 
imply, in all he says, that she is not as other women are, "fools 
and shght," but stands apart from her sex — a very great insult 
as we must all consider it. After a certain number of years 
of the new regime I am convinced that the minds of women 
would grow larger and stronger, even as their bodies have done 
in the last forty years by fresh air and exercise, and then a 
generation will arise in which women will scarcely be called 
any longer the " weaker sex." 

But the moral and intellectual advantages to women per- 
sonally which the franchise would in time — slowly perhaps, but 
surely — bring; and also the actual material gain which in many 
cases it would involve by compeUing ParHamentary attention 
to the Bills in which their interests are concerned — these gains 
are secondary to the great issue: "What will be the influence 
of the feminine vote on the politics of the nation at large?" 
For a long time it will, of course, not tell very greatly in varying 
this policy one way or another; but as time goes on, it must 
turn the balance on many questions. Will that influence be 
for bad or for good ? 

I am sure that, on the whole, it will be greatly for good. 
Mistakes may be made, and no doubt women will be affected 
like men by waves of popular sentiment, causing them some- 
times to throw their weight wrongly. But in the long run there 
can be little doubt that both the conscientiousness and the ten- 
derness of women will influence pubhc affairs and the making 
xvni [ lo ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

of laws in the direction of greater humanity toward all the 
poor and suffering, to captives, to criminals, to children, to the 
aged, to animals; and also in that of public morality; in that 
of temperance; and finally, in that of peace. No Member of 
Parliament, depending largely for his election on the votes of 
women, will (for example) sanction the licensed torture of ani- 
mals, on the ground that it is hoped it will pay in useful dis- 
coveries. 

Thus viewing the whole field of politics, I do not doubt that 
the concession of the suffrage to women on the same terms as 
men now hold it (or on any terms on which they may hold it 
from time to time), will be expedient as well as just. We are 
not a sex of saints and sages, though there have been some 
saints and sages here and there belonging to us ; and also a great 
many sinners and fools. But on the whole we are less often 
criminals than are men; perhaps we are a little less selfish; 
and certainly more conscientious than ordinary men. In short, 
in the lump, women are better than men, though not so strong 
and not so clever. As Theodore Parker well defined it: We 
are not the equals of men, but their equivalents. We are not 
their equals physically, aesthetically, or perhaps intellectually. 
They are not our equals in things higher than these — in the 
regions of moraHty and of the affections, human and divine. 

But if this be conceded, is it not to under-estimate goodness 
itself, to doubt that this better weight, thrown into the scales of 
politics, will be beneficial? Once again, I am convinced, it 
will be proved (as I started by affirming), that what is JUST 
will always be, in the highest sense, also EXPEDIENT. 



" THE ESSENTIAL EQUALITY OF MAN AND WOMAN " 

BY 

WILLIAM K. HILL 

Of the many controversies which occupy the intellectual ac- 
tivities of the human race, probably none is more ancient, in- 
teresting, and long-lived than that which concerns the relative 
xvin [ii] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

position of the sexes in rcf^ct to capacity. Before the dawn 
of civiHzation there was presumably no controversy on this 
point. If any wandering doubt entered the mind of any in- 
dividual woman, either she kept it to herself or the prompt 
apphcation of a male hand or foot silenced its expression for- 
ever. Later on in the pre-Christian civilizations of South- 
eastern Europe, if womanhood was recognized as reaching 
nearer to the admitted superiority of manhood than barbarism 
believed, the admission was largely theoretical, and its illus- 
trations in the Aspasias and Cornelias of the time were few and 
far between. The standard set up by Christ, if it took root at 
all, was soon disfigured by the famous gloss of his Apostle Paul. 
"In Hke manner, ye wives, be in subjection to your own hus- 
bands, . . . beholding your chaste behavior coupled with 
fear, ... in the incorruptible apparel of a meek and quiet 
spirit, ... as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord." The 
mediaeval appreciation of womanhood, as is well known, was 
merely a vision of passion and fancy which rose above rational 
equahty into the region of fulsome adulation. Thence through 
many stages of effort we have arrived at the so-called eman- 
cipation and higher education of woman, upon which disfran- 
chisement is perhaps the last remaining blot of any magnitude. 

But it is just in the fact of the persistence of this great and 
dark blot, and of the many smaller and lighter blots scattered 
over the sphere of sex-equality, that a great interest lies and 
much food for reflection. Why, when so many doors have been 
opened to women, are the great doors of the parliament-house 
and several other small wickets still closed to them? The 
answer will, I think, be found in the fact that, out of the sum 
of manhood, there are still but few men who, at all times and 
under all circumstances, really believe in the essential equahty 
of the sexes. Of the rest, the majority are still sceptical, and 
the minority beHeve only with half their heart, being too ready 
to trim their sails to any wind of adverse criticism blown vtji 
by the passing crazes of the Press and platform, or the drawing- 
room. 

Under these circumstances it is still a matter of interest to 
try and throw new hght upon this ancient controversy, and 
xvm [ 12 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

unveil, if it be possible, the subconscious opposition which 
makes so many men admit in theory the equality of the sexes 
and yet in practice act upon hnes which can only be justified 
by the denial of such equaHty. 

Let us consider, then, these leading characteristics of the 
human race: reason, imagination, and the initiative which 
manifests itself in creative work; emotion, courage, moral sta- 
bility, and truth ; strength and endurance. 

Reason is equally the characteristic of both sexes, but its 
derivatives, reasonableness and reasoning, are said to be more 
strongly marked in man than in woman. Man usually thinks 
before he acts. Woman is inclined very often to act before she 
thinks. The truth of this would in no way be lessened by the 
thoughtful action of the man leading, as so often happens, 
to a result inferior to that which flows from the impulsive action 
of the woman. DeHberation is not always a virtue; yet, inas- 
much as the man's action is fundamentally rational, it is likely 
to blunder less often than the sometimes successful intuition 
of the woman, and, under the conditions of the average, the 
superiority would lie with the man, assuming that this alleged 
distinction is really as widespread as men declare. I have 
heard one of the most strenuous advocates of the emancipation 
of woman assert that women are inclined to be very unreason- 
able about small matters in the sphere of the home. But this 
apparent unreasonableness has a basis in reason not properly 
appreciated by man. Take one example, which has so often 
been the subject of satire. Woman thinks punctual obedience 
to the dinner gong more important than the catching and fixing 
for posterity of some soul-compelUng metaphor or one ray of 
"the Hght that never was on sea or land," which is hovering 
just on the horizon of the imagination, but just out of pen or 
pencil grip when the gong rings. Is it not because, but for the 
assiduous cultivation of such distorted estimates of relative 
importance, she would find the details of domestic manage- 
ment altogether too sordid and wearisome, and, as a result, 
starve and weaken the great mind that is at hand-grips with 
inspiration ? 

In the matter of imagination, as manifested objectively in 
XVIII [13] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

its works, the only form ^r which we can estimate it, woman 
cannot at present set anything against such male achievements 
as the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, Hamlet, Faust, the Venus 
of Milo, Tannhduser, or the Choral Symphony, to cite only a 
few leading examples. 

In the closely aUicd quality of initiative the weakness of 
woman is loudly asserted by man and, though I shall have 
occasion to traverse this contention in certain particulars, it is 
difficult to cite any considerable number of women who have 
initiated and shaped with creative touch great works or great 
movements. The capacity for scheming and intrigue, specially 
credited to woman, is quite a different and very inferior posses- 
sion, no less common in man, as any one living amid the seeth- 
ing intrigue of present educational politics will admit. But, 
taking the quality of creative initiative, Sappho's output is 
merely fragmentary. Mrs. Browning's emotional beauty and 
imaginative fervor are, for many, disfigured by lack of musical 
sense. Cleopatra's statecraft was only destructive ; and though 
Joan of Arc must be credited with the initiation of a truly states- 
manlike conception of policy, it is doubtful if her success was 
due so much to able generalship as to the power of inspiring 
enthusiasm. The distinguishing characteristics of Elizabeth's 
greatness were a capacity for recognizing the wisdom of her 
servants and a devoted patriotism, rather than any such con- 
structive faculty as must be credited to Henry IL, Edward I., 
and others of England's great kings. In like manner the great- 
ness of Victoria was much more the outcome of her success in 
the practical application of the doctrine of constitutional govern- 
ment than in any constructive power, for which indeed the very 
system of modern constitutional government left her little scope. 

Great deeds may be laid to the credit of emotion in the his- 
tory of the world when time and circumstance favored the form 
of stimulus it gives; but the sins chargeable to its account far 
outnumber these great deeds. Woman has long held the repu- 
tation of being more emotional than man. 

"Uncertain, coy, and hard to please. 
And variable as the shade 
By the light quivering aspen made." 
XVIII [ 14 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

The reason commonly assigned is physiological, but I think the 
true cause is neither so permanent nor so incurable. 

In courage, moral stability, mental endurance, and truth it 
would seem as if man could claim no superiority, and in the 
last three must even yield to woman; for there are many brave 
women, and woman's power of mental endurance is famous, 
while her morality, truth, conscientiousness, and general good 
behavior, in youth at least, are superior to man's. None the 
less woman has always been looked upon as more timid than 
man, while woman and nerves have always been associated in 
the popular fancy. It is well known that in fundamental virtues 
woman is more fastidious than man; for Pope's dictum that 
"every woman is at heart a rake" was merely a sacrifice of 
truth to epigram ; but in the minor verities of social intercourse 
her laxity has long been the butt of the social satirist. No one 
charges her with a tendency to covet her neighbor's husband 
as a man covets his neighbor's wife; but, when it is a case of 
the neighbor's ox or ass, as symbolized in jewelry, servants, 
or a double coach-house, she is credited with being of an envious 
and even mahcious disposition. Only two or three times in a 
century, as in the Humbert case, is she convicted of taking part 
in a great "deal"; but social fibs and hypocrisies are freely 
laid to her charge. The most virulent misogynist has never 
accused her of being splendide mendax, like the company pro- 
moter; but the support she gives to ceremonial observances 
whose spirit has long since evaporated, lends point to a charge 
of small insincerities. Few men have thought more highly of 
women than Thackeray did, yet he says : " There are some mean- 
nesses which are too mean even for man — v/oman, lovely woman 
alone, can venture to commit them." Here also I shall have 
occasion to traverse popular opinion, while admitting the germ 
of truth from which it is developed. 

The asserted inferiority of woman in physical strength and 
endurance is difficult to controvert; for it may be contended 
that the endurance of pain, in which she claims a superiority, 
is merely the endurance which comes of use. The man cries 
out, because the sensation is strange to him. The woman 
suffers pain in silence, as one endures the querulousness of old 
XVIII [15] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

age, because one expects and allows for it. If, however, this 
be true, it would seem to ^ a question, not of inferiority, but 
of habit, with the sole difference that nature has assigned to 
woman larger opportunities of acquiring the particular habit in 
question. 

Whatever, then, may be the virtue and abihty of individual 
women, and however high such individuals may soar above the 
average of manhood, it is alleged that, on the main counts of 
human characteristics, woman in the mass is inferior to man in 
the mass. I shall presently try to show that, if the statement 
must be admitted a fact, it is only a present fact. I do not 
beheve that this inferiority of woman need be, or is likely to be, 
permanent. I come now to my second thesis. 

Assuming for the moment that woman's achievement is, 
up to the present time, inferior to man's, what is the funda- 
mental cause of her backwardness ? Surely false training fos- 
tered by fallacious tradition. 

I have said that woman is now, even in this twentieth cen- 
tury, charged with being niore unreasonable than man. If this 
be true, it is because generations of self-absorbed fathers and 
unenlightened mothers have steadily brought up their sons in 
such a manner as to develop reasonableness, and their daughters 
in such a manner as to develop unreasonableness. The teach- 
ing of Euclid in schools is a trite example. Even now in many 
schools this first essay in logical deduction is begun later by 
girls than boys. How long is it since elementary — or any — 
science was generally introduced into the curriculum of girls' 
schools? But the false lead in the direction of non-reasoning 
has long been given much earhcr and more subtly — in the 
playing fields by the inferiority of the girls' games for develop- 
ing reason (compare rounders and skipping with cricket and 
hockey, battledore and shuttlecock with football), and at home 
by the consideration which is given to childish whims when 
shown in the girl, while in the boy they are laughed at as un- 
manly. This toleration of action upon impulse and fancy 
has been carried on throughout the woman's childhood and 
youth until it has justified the Shakespearean satire upon the 
adult woman: ''I have no other but a woman's reason; I think 
XVIII [ i6 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

it so because I think it so." For centuries romancers, who are 
among the most powerful moulders of sex character, have de- 
lighted in representing the pretty, but empty-headed, woman's 
unreasonableness as a positive charm in the eyes of her male 
adorer, that is, until the practical realities of married life have 
shown him that reasonableness is a maker, fancifulness a de- 
stroyer, of human happiness. In a word, lovers and romancers 
have combined to describe unreasonableness as a most reason- 
able thing in woman, and, heredity helping, woman has un- 
consciously moulded herself in strict accordance with the prosaic 
doctrine of supply and demand. 

Again, aided and abetted by the approving smile of man, 
woman herself has clipped the wings of her own imagination 
so that it should not soar over the low walls of the nursery. 
How should woman conceive Iliads and Divine Comedies, when 
generations of mothers and grandmothers have taught her that 
woman's sphere of action is not life, time, or eternity, but the 
little world of infancy and childhood with its small delights 
and sorrows, its crude conceptions and narrow horizon of ac- 
tivities? So the Faust of womanhood is dwarfed into Jack of 
the Beanstalk, who sells his infantile obligations for an immoral 
purchase of beans. Her Venus of Milo becomes the plump 
and rosy Cupid of the bath-tub, so much so that her very notion 
of physical beauty becomes confused with that of physical 
luxuriance, and she describes a more or less shapeless present- 
ment of healthy flesh and muscle as a "lovely" baby. Later 
on this early stunting of artistic appreciation brings her to the 
admiration and adoption of the false anatomy and false curves 
of the milliner's model. Similarly her sense of musical grandeur 
is kept chained to the ditties of the Piper's Son and all his 
fraternity. If she rocks her last cradle on the wrong side of 
forty, it is small wonder that her musical imagination never gets 
beyond the Choral Symphonies of the nursery. It is no answer 
to this argument to cite the large attendance of women at art 
galleries and classical concerts ; for to galleries and concerts they 
go merely to absorb artistic and musical thought and beauty. 
The sphere of stimulus to artistic and musical imagination is, 
for the vast majority of women, the environment of the cradle. 
XVIII J [17] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

Lastly, woman's physi^Jp inferiority also was the product 
of bad air and sedentary conventions rather than natural de- 
fectiveness. Every year opens to her some new profession, 
long thought to be too arduous for female limbs and feminine 
minds. Her tenacity and determination in these professions 
prove that the physical strength of her savage ancestress, who 
tilled the earth and built the home while her savage lord amused 
himself with bow and spear, has only been lying in abeyance 
till a wiser tradition called it forth to labor in the more refined 
fields of activity which modern civilization throws open equally 
to both sexes. Everywhere the opening up of woman's intel- 
lectual liberty asserts itself in her physical improvement — the 
height of her figure, the strength of her foot and arm, and the 
general quickening of her gait and carriage — all pointing to 
the breaking up of a false tradition of sedentary dulness and 
spiritual starvation. 

False training, then, fostered by fallacious tradition, has lain 
at the root of that backwardness of woman which has so long 
been supposed to be the product of inherent and irremediable 
inferiority, but is now shown to be no more inherent than the 
rapidly disappearing savagery and coarseness of man, which 
also were once thought to be the distinguishing and not wholly 
unworthy mark of his manhood. 

And now for my last thesis — Will woman ever be indis- 
putably equal to man, and when ? To this question the scoffer, 
shutting his eyes, answers glibly "no" and "never"; but the 
thoughtful man, looking round with wide eyes and a pondering 
mind, and applying the measure of his own experience, notes 
the rapid progress woman has made even in his own memory. 
If the bent of his mind leads him to look for the root of things 
below the efflorescence which alone attracts the average mind, he 
will observe the significant fact that woman has begun her race 
for equality with man by first securing the equipment of education. 

Education is the great economizer of historic effort, and will 
enable woman to cover in a few years a field of accomplishment 
which illiterate man traversed with pain and error and frequent 
backsliding only in a decade or a century. Therefore woman 
will move rapidly through the necessary schooling of experience, 
XVIII [ i8 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

which man has traversed slowly through the ages. Our curious 
observer will note yet another significant phenomenon of the 
twentieth century, which, rumor says, has attained the pro- 
portions of a social anxiety in America — the gradual alienation 
of man from the powerful agent of self-development named 
above. If man turns from education, which, in the guise of 
modern science, has been mainly responsible for the abnormal 
strides made by modern civilization, in order to dull his finer 
susceptibilities upon the coarser grain of commercial and finan- 
cial operations — if he allows woman to take over his respon- 
sibilities in the matter of brain production — the march of her 
intellectual and moral development will be proportionately ac- 
celerated, and the speed with which she is already overhauling 
him in the race will grow daily greater. Even now woman's 
once ready admission of inferiority has gro"\\Ti reticent, and she 
is generally eager to claim at least an equality of abihty with its 
consequential rights. The modern Harriet Byron is no longer 
considered to outstep decorum when she enters upon an argu- 
ment with the modern Walden, and it is no uncommon experi- 
ence to see a mixed assembly listening with pleasure to an intel- 
ligent woman while she expounds her " views" on some matter 
of current interest. In the middle and upper classes woman 
is now expected to be intelligent and reasonable as well as 
pretty, and the absence of the last, when nature happens to 
be unkind, is more readily tolerated than the absence of either 
of the first two qualities. Indeed, some of us know cases where 
wit, wisdom, and character are found to obliterate entirely a 
positive ugliness which w^ould have made the woman in ques- 
tion impossible in seventeenth and eighteenth century society. 
Though grace and beauty will always hold sway, the eyes of 
the lover are becoming less easily dazzled, and the exhilaration 
which thrills the male being when first inoculated with love's 
poison is apt to be followed by shrewd questionings as to the qual- 
ity of the brain that fights the fascinating eyes. Dolls are less 
easily mistaken for goddesses, and mainly because your true 
divinity is more in request; for which reason, as the value of 
the real diamond makes its purchase a work of judgment that 
reacts upon its value, so the supply of a better class of femininity 
xvni [ 19 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

has aroused a finer male (incrimination that is again reacting 
upon the quality of that femininity. 

In the matter of initiative, woman has shown a growing 
capacity since female emancipation brought opportunities to 
her. Naturally at first she has displayed this capacity in those 
spheres which were already the fields of her particular interest 
when emancipation came — education and philanthropy. The 
recent movement for the higher education of women, the associa- 
tions for fostering child-study, co-education and the kinder- 
garten, the temperance and various minor movements, furnish 
ample evidence of capacity for initiative in woman. If we bear 
in mind that, chronologically, these movements stand in the 
history of woman's effort where the Crusades, the Reformation, 
and the Renaissance stood in the history of man, it is difficult 
to avoid the conclusion that, as time and opportunity bring 
experience and practice, it will be discovered that initiative in 
woman was never absent, but merely latent. Already on the gov- 
erning councils of educational bodies, and on certain bodies en- 
gaged in municipal administration, woman shares with honor and 
distinction in the initiation and moulding of constructive work. 

I have already noted woman's superiority in the funda- 
mental virtues and the signs of her improvement in the minor 
verities. Ceremonial with all its insincerity still exerts its subtle 
influence over woman. The scofTer says "because woman is 
foolish." The physiologist says "because woman is woman," 
that is, "a creature that feels rather than reasons." I venture 
to traverse both assertions, and ascribe her excess of devotion 
to ceremonial, whether in life or religion, first to the stunting 
of her reasoning faculty during a long period of male tyranny, 
with the consequent intensification of the other — the emotional — 
side of her human nature. Secondly, I attribute it to the greater 
purity and naive innocence of her character — the result of long 
years of training in the cult of "goodness" — which encourages 
and enables her to read reahty into ceremonial shams and 
make the most soulless simulacrum a real expression of what 
it should be, but is not — a real feeling. But the reasoning 
faculty of woman is no longer stunted. It is nourished as- 
siduously by modern science, which knows not sex. Her 
XVIII [ 20 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

"goodness" is no longer "goody-goodness." The prudery of 
affected ignorance has given place to the modesty of discreet 
knowledge. It is now possible for a woman to know the truths 
of physiology and yet be pure-minded, just as it is now possible 
for a man to be manly without being coarse. Both sexes are 
approximating to a modesty which is independent of drapery 
and, consequently, to an abhorrence and avoidance of shams, 
of coverings up, of whited sepulchres, of incongruities between 
the inside and the outside of the cup and platter. The great 
agent of this approximation has been modern science, which 
teaches men and women equally to look before they think, to 
think before they judge, and to judge before they generalize — 
a serial process which is fatal to hollov/ ceremonial and flores- 
cent shams. In the matter of physical strength and endur- 
ance, the rapid entry of woman .into the arena of male labor, 
as soon as the artificial barriers of prejudice were broken down, 
and her ever-increasing and successful competition with man, 
show that the levelling up of her physical strength to his — 
certain temporary functional derangements excepted — is only 
a matter of time and training. 

Everywhere, then, the rapid rise of woman from the charac- 
teristics of a depressed existence to those of a free and equal 
development shows that her inferiority to man is factitious and 
not inherent — the result merely of artificial restrictions now 
withdrawn, not the outcome of a poorer raw material which 
can never take the higher polish that man has acquired and now 
boasts to be the proof of a superior metal. That woman, then, 
will one day be and appear, in all but functional peculiarities, 
mentally, morally, and physically equal to man appears to me 
to be beyond a doubt. The question is, when will she arrive 
at this equality ? Reasoning with the rule of actuality, no man 
can mark the point of future time at which this "consumm.a- 
tion devoutly to be wished" will be attained. So many lets 
and hinderances crowd the path of progress. But, measuring 
by probabilities, if the present rate of woman's development is 
maintained, the attainment of equality cannot be far distant 
in the coming centuries. There is in woman's work, as many 
have noted, a driving earnestness and a conscientious concen- 

XVIII [ 21 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

tration of effort which fcu^ransccnd the application of man, 
who hkes to move leisurely and with due attention to comfort 
and relaxation. This deadly earnestness often dries up the sap 
of humor and stumbles for want of imagination ; but its driving 
force is enormous and enables progress to cover ground in a 
surprising fashion. Therefore woman will not require all the 
centuries man has had to attain a proportionate perfection, 
and thereafter she will overhaul him by leaps and bounds. 
But, it may be asked, is it not probable that man's rate of prog- 
ress may be accelerated when the fear of competition becomes 
present to his imagination, and may he not thus defy woman 
and retain his present lead? He may; but the probabilities 
are against it. For man's progress has been steady and natural, 
and there is no reason to suppose that its velocity could be 
materially accelerated. Woman's progress, on the other hand, 
has been "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd," and, now the repression 
has been suddenly withdrawn, the forward leap of her progress 
is not unlike the rebound of a new spring that has long been 
held down against the strong impulse of its potential power. 
Now she is free, more or less, woman makes haste to reap the 
fruits of freedom, and her haste will last until she draws level 
with the rights and powers of man. Then we may hope with 
confidence — for the grounds of hope are apparent even now — 
certain elements of her character— whether the product of her 
sex-individuality or her peculiar fate in the past, it is impossible 
to say with certainty — will add new elements to the character 
of man, drawing in exchange new elements to her own. There- 
after, and as a happy consequence, the velocity of their joint 
progress may exceed that of either in the unregenerate days of 
sex-prejudice and sex-cfppression. 

Finally, who will gain most by this equality of the sexes? 
Surely, man himself ; for there is little exaggeration in Otway's 
panegyric on woman : 

' ' Nature made thee 

To temper man; we had been brutes without you. 

Angels are painted fair, to look like you; 

There's in you all that we believe of heaven: 

Amazing brightness, purity, and truth, 

Eternal joy, and everlasting love." 
XVIII [ 22 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

Those advantages which the days of woman's suppression gave 
to man were poor indeed — a httle self-complacency, which only 
detracted from the dignity of his manhood — a little glorifica- 
tion of physical superiority, which was too often associated with 
intellectual inferiority — a monopoly of avocations, which only 
loaded him with the burden of himself maintaining his women 
relatives or seeing them humiliated, like Ruth Pinch, by the 
mortifications of shabby genteel dependence upon the caprice 
of insolent vulgarity — or, lastly, the pitiful consciousness of an 
intellectual superiority, which was daily and hourly revenged 
by a companionship that could bring neither sympathy, with his 
aims and aspirations in life, nor help and inspiration in the day 
of difficulty and defeat. Of all the joys that the emancipation 
of woman has brought to man, surely none can be greater than 
that which springs from the life companionship of an intelli- 
gent and cultivated wife and the devotion of daughters endowed 
with all the mental and physical beauties that are developed by 
modern education in place of the mean aspirations and futile 
follies of the old days of domesticity and deportment. And 
when woman has become equal to man, equal in every sense, 
the charm and happiness of the new companionship will per- 
meate every walk of his life. Let his avocation be the study 
of " the floor of heaven," that's " thick inlaid with patines of 
bright gold," a study fraught with the loftiest intellectual 
suggestion and the charm of an infinite mystery that unfolds 
a little portion of its wonders day by day and yet remains as 
vast and incommensurate as ever. How delightful it will be for 
him to find in the constant companion of his days the rational 
interest, the intelligent sympathy of a Caroline Herschell, and a 
help as ready and as valuable as that of any hireling colleague, 
in place of a vacant look and a puzzled frown, or the irritating 
indifference of a soul that cannot soar above the price of steak 
or the misdemeanors of a witless housemaid! How delightful 
it will be to traverse with a companion of equal intellect and 
equal culture the glorious treasure-house of history or delve 
thus aided in the inexhaustible mine of nature! "The soul's 
armor," says Ruskin, "is never well set to the heart unless a 
woman's hand has braced it." There is no path now trodden 
XVIII [ 23 ] 



UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 

by man which will not b#Bmc smoother, brighter, and more 
richly furnished with the light of imagination, the bloom of 
sentiment, the vigor of thought, and all that elevates the work 
of reason above the impulse of instinct, by the companionship 
of "earth's noblest thing, a woman perfected." The married 
state, so often now but little removed from a " paidotrophic 
partnership," where, after the first bloom of passion fades, con- 
tempt and bitterness are mitigated only by the pleasures of the 
lower nature, will more often become, as sometimes it does now, 
a perfect fusion of differing but equipollent entities. The union 
of these two will add to the treasure of the state a third more 
perfect twofold organism, and to the world-forces which are 
building for posterity the impetus of a mighty stream that 
springs from the union of two noble tributaries, bearing within 
its bosom a double fertility and in the sweep of its creating 
current a more than double power. 



XVIII [ 24 ] 



XIX 



SOCIETY 

"THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN SOCIETY" 

BY 

LADY MARY PONSONBY 



TT/'E have endeavored to look on woman intellectually in 
''^' her relation to the life of to-day, emoiionally in her 
relation to man. It still remains to consider her in connection 
with that bewildering organization which she has herself built 
up and to which, instinctively allowing it precedence over all 
other social problems, we give the general name of society — 
the association of human beings of the ^^ upper crust. ''^ 

In America we have no very clearly established cult of aris- 
tocracy. It is true that the newspapers of one great city or 
another occasionally refer to their own particular set of money 
or idleness, as "society.^' But no one of the groups thus dis- 
tinguished holds any special influence except such as rises from 
intellect or wealth, of the former of which they have assuredly 
no monopoly, while the other is usually employed much more 
ejfectually outside their circle. In England, on the other hand, 
a recognized aristocracy has long held assured control of life's 
best gifts. Lady Mary Ponsonby, herself a -firmly established 
member of this favored class, is therefore appealed to here to 
explain to us the meaning of this social world, "the ladies' 
world,'' in its past, its present, and its future. 

They were very delightful, those Frenchwomen of the 

eighteenth century. They were witty, clever, unscrupulous; 

often very loyal, always very powerful, as acknowledged rulers 

of their house or salon, and of Society. Their political opin- 

XIX [ I ] 



SOCIETY 

ions were hopelessly wroi^ but not more so than those of the 
men of the time. 

Why did they possess a power denied to their English 
contemporaries; or rather held by these in far less strength? 
One might inquire why Society in France in the eighteenth 
century shows to that of England in the present day so many 
points of resemblance. It might be diverting, but unfore- 
seen difficulties forbid a close comparison. Differences of tra- 
dition, of surroundings, of education arc to be met with at 
every turn; yet the analogy is at moments so exact that it 
should be possible, by keeping the respective threads of re- 
semblance and dissimilarity clear and untangled, to arrive at 
a fairly true presentment. 

The psychological, physiological, analytical introspective 
method has been done to death. In studies of this order, 
even of the first rank, let us say such as M. Bourgct's Cos- 
mopoUs or Mrs. Humphry Ward's Marcella, the author acts 
too much as showman; you cannot get rid of his presence; 
he or she is forever looking over your shoulder, pointing out 
how you ought to see this and detect the other. The value 
of impartiality in an artist has often been pointed out, and 
this rare equality he best shows by leaving it to the spectator 
to form his own judgment on what he sees, giving him no 
clue and pursuing him with no comment. This impartiality 
is more likely to be ours if we gather our information of a past 
epoch from contemporary memoirs, letters, and individual 
sayings, rather than from comments and disquisitions in which 
the place of critic and exponent takes up too much room. 
As a rule, however, it must be owned that a French writer 
rarely over-explains. In England we have improved in this 
respect, but we are still harassed by the over-exphcit writer 
of biography. It is true, certain young and clever authors 
are drifting away from this position, perhaps too far, into a 
"green carnation" and cheaply paradoxical vein of impres- 
sional writing; yet the general public likes explanation, and, 
to please it, explanations rounded with literary platitudes arc 
reeled off. On the stage, this mania for explanation, this 
craving for diffuse details, produces a still more offensive 

XIX [ 2 ] 



SOCIETY 

state of things. In order that the inevitable and satisfactory 
denouement should be rightly understood, it has been found 
sometimes necessary to add an act to an English adaptation 
of a French play, so that nothing may be left to the intelli- 
gence of the audience. But, in the present inquiry, in spite 
of our wish to leave the ordinary reader to his unbiassed judg- 
ment, it is impossible, even in a slight sketch on so knotty 
and intricate a question as the role played by women in past 
and present times, to ignore what has been written by some 
of our would-be teachers. When, for instance, some few 
years ago, Mrs. Lynn Linton made a series of fierce but able 
attacks on the champions of women's rights, she little guessed 
that that object of her particular scorn — the new woman — 
would be as extinct as the ichthyosaurus before the end of 
the nineteenth century, or that the inference she drew points 
to a source of power in the famous women in the past which, 
if analyzed, she would have been the first to reject. Mrs. 
Lynn Linton in her accounts of the women of Rome and 
Greece admits that their power was, in the main, in propor- 
tion to their frailty. This granted — and that there is no way 
of accounting for it, except by allowing for the different stand- 
ard of morality then prevalent or by the fact that love in its 
sensual aspect will ever prove itself the strongest factor in the 
art of ruling man — then there is an end of the controversy. 

This sceptre Frenchwomen wielded almost irresistibly in 
the eighteenth century. Their reign was still more remark- 
able in the seventeenth, but, except to glance at the quahties 
derived by our eighteenth-century friends from their prede- 
cessors, we must refrain from dwelhng on the never-faihng 
interest and charms of Mesdames de Sevigne, de Lafayette, 
de Maintenon, etc. The pedantic tone of the Hotel Ram- 
bouillet was gradually abandoned after the appearance of 
Les Femmes Savantes and Les Precieuses Ridicules. After 
a while, nobody in Society durst indulge in long and wordy 
jeux d'esprit. For all that, a shadow of the old pedantry 
darkened the social sky at intervals. Mazarin's nieces, es- 
pecially Marie Mancini, Princesse de Colonna, and la Du- 
chesse de Mazarin, brought Italian exaggeration to bear on 
XIX [ 3 ] 



SOCIETY 

French frivolity, and the^tsult was not a happy one; but 
it is in the picture of the Cour de Sceaux that the acme of 
stilted and, at the same time, puerile and extravagant arti- 
ficiality seems to have been reached. 

The manner of life of this Court, inspired by the Duchesse 
du Maine, as described in the memoirs of the day, fully de- 
serves this description. She paid her satellites to be amusing, 
but amusing in the mode she prescribed. Amused she would 
be, by day and by night, and every one had to contribute to 
this hunt for happiness through what would appear to the 
uninitiated as the very tedious paths of madrigals, sonnets, 
bouts-rimes, in which the little Duchesse appeared sometimes 
as Venus, sometimes as Minerva, now as a nymph, then as a 
siren. On n'avaii jamais une heure devant soi pour Hre hHe 
en paix; but the lighter recreations of poetical invitations to 
dinner, of anonymous compUments inserted in a bouquet, 
of laborious pleasantries which weary the soul even to hear 
of, began to pall on the chdielaine of Sceaux. Acting became 
the rage, and the indefatigable Duchesse divided her time 
between the stage and assiduous studies in astronomy, philos- 
ophy, and the classics. Needless to say, each pursuit and 
study was followed under the special guidance of the favorite 
reigning in that department. Among the Duchesse du Maine's 
intellectual disciples — let us put it so — she at one time could 
boast of Voltaire, who, having quarrelled with the authori- 
ties, took refuge at Sceaux. He was hidden away in a room 
apart, with closed shutters, and there he remained for two 
months. In the daytime he amused himself by writing his 
contes, and during the night he joined the Duchesse and her 
friends in their celebrations of les grandes nuits de Sceaux. 
These diversions of the Duchesse du Maine appear to have 
been more innocent than their title would imply. The form 
this amusement took made so severe a call on the Uterary 
capacity of those engaged in it that even scandal finds no 
place in the record of these nocturnal orgies. All the ardor, 
misplaced energy, the Duchesse had spent on fruitless pohtical 
intrigues and small hole-and-corner conspiracies she now di- 
verted to this frantic struggle against ennui. Her sleepless- 
XIX [4] 



SOCIETY 

ness was what led her to turn night into day, and the guests, 
exhausted with games, madrigal- turning, sonnet-composing, 
and perhaps, who shall say, love-making, implored with no 
effect for a moment's peace during the gorgeous breakfasts 
served to them at sunrise; but the rule held good, in spite 
of a sleepless night, de V esprit, encore de V esprit,- tou jours de 
Vesprit. With the arrival of Voltaire and Madame du Chate- 
let the programme was altered, and tragedies, operas, ballets, 
farces, took the place of less ambitious pastimes. Madame 
du Chatelet evidently bored Madame du Maine consid- 
erably with her mathematics, her translations of Newton's 
works, her geometrical problems strewn over every avail- 
able table in the comfortable reception-rooms; so Madame 
du Maine swept away the learned rubbish and insisted on 
forcing Madame du Chatelet on to the stage, and making her 
take an active part in the private theatricals. These, under 
the new direction, became a scene of indiscriminate social 
hcense; Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet inviting every one, 
known and unknown, to the Theatre de Sceaux, so that a dis- 
turbance took place which threatened to break up the whole 
concern. Voltaire pleaded, wrote, faltered, and won his way 
back into favor, begging that the protecting genius, the soul 
of Corneille, the spirit of the great Conde, would deign to be 
his Hterary Egeria; and all ended well. The httle Duchesse 
forgave and retained her star. She pursued her way un- 
daunted, and her seventy-seventh birthday found her still 
hard at work, amusing herself, vexed now and then at the 
abrupt departure of some of her friends for the next world, 
but observing at the same time that after all it was less an- 
noying than to keep her waiting for an entertainment or a 
card party. Perhaps her rank and her behef in the divinity 
of royal blood prevented the parties at Sceaux from being 
quite accurately typical of the artificial and pedantic salon 
which survived long after the Hotel Rambouillet had been 
swept away. Be this as it may, one impression is worth noting 
—that not a trace of the love of the natural to be found even 
in the most pedantic and pompous moment of the grand siecle 
can be detected in the social atmosphere of Sceaux. We 
XIX [ 5 ] 



SOCIETY 

have seen that some intl^st in that miniature Court was de- 
rived from the flavor and point which Voltaire's sayings and 
doings always seem to carry with them; but how incapable 
were the Duchesse du Maine and her friends of the enthu- 
siastic appreciation of Lafontaine by Madame de Sevigne and 
her friends, Madame de Bouillon, Madame de la Sabhere, etc.! 
Their admiration is more striking than the homage paid him 
by Moliere, Racine, and La Rochefoucauld, who, of course, 
having le flair litteraire in a supreme degree, detected the 
master poet and writer, in spite of his extraordinary simplicity. 
Madame de Sevigne and her friends loved him for this sim- 
phcity. I do not know whether Madame de Maintenon was 
one of this group, but she certainly felt the reaction toward 
the natural and the actual that she is always insisting upon 
in her correspondence. Here we shake off the long and wordy 
jeux d* esprit; the tedious and rounded periods gave way to 
short and witty epigrams. These were the direct offpring 
of La Rochefoucauld's maxims. Women decided it was 
wicked to be bored. A hushed whisper to this effect soon 
found its way into the sacred precincts of the Court, Ma- 
dame de Maintenon, who, it may be shrewdly suspected, put 
on the airs of a pedant to avoid tiresome functions, gave her 
rival, Madame de Montespan, enough to do when the latter 
attempted to answer the governess's sarcasms on the empty 
silliness of the lives of the courtiers; and Madame de Mon- 
tespan always got the worst of the encounter. 

The good-humored but very distinct aversion of Madame 
de Sevigne to bores inspired some of her wittiest letters and 
her most brilHant epigrams. The joyousness of her tone 
(Ninon de Lenclos said of her wit, "La joie de I'esprit en fait 
la force "^) took the sting out of the dart. She gave the word 
in favor of brightness and she damned heaviness. The notes 
of her friend Madame de Lafayette on La Rochefoucauld 
outdid his very maxims in brevity and pith, and very good 
advice these ladies gave their friends on style. Madame de 

Coigny, in a letter to Mademoiselle X , "lui recommande 

de prendre des notes sur la lecture"; "d'ecrire ses pensees c'est 

^ "The joy of wit makes its power." 
XIX [ 6 ] 



SOCIETY 

unc fagon de savoir si on est bete. . . . Penser ses lectures, 
nc pas lire comme si on mangeait dcs cerises."^ Their games 
even had become racy and amusing. One of the most di- 
verting was the game of portraits, when each member of an 
assembled company, after taking the oath of sincerity, was 
bound to write a truthful account of himself in a few lines. 
To relate the disputes and corrections evolved by these worded 
portraits would take us too far from our present purpose. 

It is easy to see that the ground for the reign of fair women 
of the eighteenth century was well prepared. The rule of 
la pai'jaife bonne compagnie was estabHshcd in the absence 
of all moral law, and became an authority from which there 
was no appeal. The note of perfect and sincere poHteness, 
the distinction in speech, manner, and expression, became a 
kind of freemasonry protecting the admitted members from 
any intrusion from without. The acquirements of a perfect 
manner may seem but a trivial aim ; but when we find the code 
of rules to be observed to include deHcacy of touch in dealing 
with the feelings of others, a readiness of perception as to 
what would cause offence, the avoidance of all unnecessary 
friction, the art of praising without flattery, of showing off 
the merits of others without appearing to protect them; and 
if you add to these characteristics the charm of ease and nat- 
uralness, and the feeling that air, manner, and speech com- 
bine to convey graceful and intelligent kindness, you feel in- 
clined to agree with the author quoted by the De Goncourts 
who compared the spirit of good society at that time with the 
spirit of charity, a bold comparison, a little in the way of a 
very modern saying that defines "tact as inspiration in small 
things." 

And so this code of gentle manners and conduct, rigor- 
ously enforced, supported the more important fabric of the 
law of honor — the law from which there is no appeal, the 
last religion of France. From the grand utterance, "Tout est 
perdu fors I'honneur," to the present day there have been 

^ " Would suggest taking notes of one's reading; to write one's 
thoughts is a way to see if one is stupid. . . . Think over your reading, 
do not read as if you were eating cherries." 

XIX [ 7 ] 



SOCIETY 

doubtless violations of tha^-odc; and it is, perhaps, ridiculed 
by those who would rather sneer at it than account for it. 
In England and in France to-day it is running some risk of 
extinction from the worship of money, but human nature as 
we find it in the average gentleman has still an unconscious 
love of the ideal as represented in the point of honor. In 
England we prefer the men found dead with the colors of 
their regiment wrapped around them, to the reform.ers who 
cynically advise the disuse of the flag as a useless colored rag. 
In France, in spite of the destructives who are ready to cry 
"A bas la patrie! A bas I'honneur!" the current opinion of 
honest men flows in the opposite direction. The view that 
the complaisant husband is the lowest animal extant, that to 
be mercenary in love is vile, that to hold up even the caprice 
of a woman to the ridicule of one's friends is ignominious, 
is still held, as a matter of course, by men of honor, at the 
same time that they are unconscious of the source from which 
it springs. It is a truth of all time that men are slow to recog- 
nize what they owe to beliefs they may have shaken off, but 
which control their instincts, after the expression of such be- 
liefs in set form has ceased to compel their assent and to em- 
body their convictions. 

In the eighteenth century the code of honor was enforced 
in vigorous and uncompromising terms, and it is for this 
reason that we find it regulating the lives of women strongly, 
if indirectly. In some respects it might seem that the honor 
of women had never been so lightly regarded, and that un- 
bounded hcense reigned supreme; but, if we look more closely 
into the matter, we shall find it not exactly true. To gener- 
ahze in this way would be as misleading as if, looking back 
still further, we were to regard the rough and brutal manners 
in the days of La Fronde as the essential feature of the time. 
At first sight it seems difficult to believe that the code of honor 
and morahty of the heroes and heroines of that day was based 
upon a strong belief in themselves. But so it was. The 
"Gentleman," as he is called in Marguerite de Navarre's 
heptameron, never doubted that success in love, be it ever 
so unlawful, must be accomplished, and the lady's consent 
XIX [ 8 ] 



SOCIETY 

was rarely questioned; but if she proved severely virtuous, 
death made the disappointed lover interesting for all time. 
The crudities, even the indecencies, were never vicious, and 
the whole atmosphere was charged with more vitaHty and 
strength than can be found with their descendants two hun- 
dred years later. 

But, in judging the standard of conduct in the days of 
these descendants, we must allow as broad a margin for the 
spirit of the times as we find ourselves giving their predecessors. 
Let us take their views on marriage. In marriage, in the 
eighteenth century, there was little conception of a solemnity, 
still less of a sacrament. In exceptional instances, in the 
days of the Marguerites of Navarre and Valois, we find the 
atmosphere of crime and Ucense Hghtened by redeeming traits 
of high loyalty and devotion, and by a distinct note of poetry 
and rehgion; but no such gleams illumined their descendants; 
yet we must allow that a conventional sense of honor per- 
sisted, and it led to curious contradictions in its appHcation. 
The manage de convenance et non dHnclination was as much 
the rule of good French society in the seventeenth and eigh- 
teenth centuries, a rule admitted and applauded, as it is, in 
spite of denials and disclaimers, in the England of to-day. 

Examples show that there was observed a code of honor 
in dishonor as it were, an unwritten law the breaking of which 
brought the inevitable penalty of ostracism. The limits of a 
husband's forbearance were strictly defined, and the net re- 
sult of the restraint which the necessity of keeping up ap- 
pearances entailed was that a mystery of romance environed 
a woman who was known to live a separate existence from 
the man whose name she bore. A passion faithful and deep 
might be found to be the key to all that was best in her exist- 
ence. Some, no doubt, were shameless, but they derived from 
les jemnies galantes of the sixteenth century; and even among 
these, recklessness, but not commonness, was the main factor 
in their adventurous lives. Some were simply excellent and 
devoted wives, like the Duchesse de Choiseul, who had never, 
she said, been able to conceive greater perfection in mind or 
body than could be found in her very fickle lord. 
XIX [ 9 ] 



SOCIETY 

It was the prcrogati\-^Wif the mother, and the mother 
alone, to direct the conduct not only of her daughters, but 
of her sons. A young man, says M. de Segur, who failed in 
respectful attention to a woman, or to a man older than him- 
self, knew that the fact would be reported to his mother that 
very evening. I forget whether it was the Due de Niver- 
nais or the Prince de Ligne who, upon being asked his per- 
mission by his sons to organize a jete chain pel re or some such 
entertainment, pointed to their disordered dress after a day's 
chase and said: "When you have made yourselves fit to enter 
your mother's apartment and have obtained her leave, I will 
confirm it." 

And so the rule of women became the principle on which 
rested, not only the government of the family, but also the 
control of the State. The spontaneous and natural note which 
strikes one in all these women did and said, the right royal 
power they wielded by reason of the high level of their in- 
telligence — this power acknowledged by all and justifying 
their unbounded ambition — had for its foundation charm and 
strength; but charm gradually fades and strength becomes 
weakness in the downward course. The proceedings at the 
Court of Sceaux show the dark side of the picture, and it is 
painful to discern the beginning of the bad taste, the exag- 
geration, and the other symptoms of disordered brains which, 
as the century waxed older, seemed to characterize the be- 
wildered women who succeeded the refined, intelligent spiri- 
tuelles, though often profligate ladies, whose education was 
begun at the Convent of L'Abbaye-aux-Bois. The woman 
who could reign undisputed over husband, lover, or king was 
unable to cope with the attack on Society by the new destruc- 
tive forces of the intellectual world, and fell into a more and 
more hopeless condition and became a helpless prey to her 
nerves. The feverish pursuit of pleasure, the ceaseless round 
of gatherings, brilliant and pointed with wit, but desperately 
exhausting in the long run, filled every hour of the day and 
night, and led, needless to say, to the worst form of reaction, 
the falhng back on self and finding nothing there. Hence 
the demon, called by them in their despair Pennemi, took up 
XIX [ lO ] 



SOCIETY 

his abode in them. The secret enemy, the incurable com- 
plaint, the unconquerable and ever-present foe they dragged 
smilingly about with them. This foe became the motive 
power of all their exertions, of all their ill-nature, and of their 
love of scandal; this gave zest to their intrigues, for to believe 
themselves amused, they thought, might shake off the ob- 
session. But no, they could not escape it; the disgust of 
self, of friends, of society, even of solitude, persisted. 

La grande ennuyee, Madame du Deffand, tells us that the 
bore of solitude is the most overwhelming and crushing form 
of ennui. This downward course was marked by stages which 
have a strange likeness to phases of social life in England 
at the present day. The description of these vagaries ap- 
pears in most of the letters and memoirs of that day. MM. 
de Goncourt have perhaps collected more material than any 
other modern author on the mode of life of the eighteenth- 
century fin-de-si^cle women. One of the points they insist 
on is the dryness of spirit and want of heart preceding the 
outbursts of maudlin sentimentality and affectation of tender- 
ness which became the fashion; also the exaggerated mani- 
festations of friendship between women. Hymns to friend- 
ship, altars to friendship, eternal vows of constancy became 
the vogue; also an exchange of love tokens, of colored em- 
blematic knots, etc., the messenger employed to convey these 
being some effeminate man, who, content with the gossiping 
companionship of the young married woman, made it often 
his business to prepare the way for another's more signal suc- 
cess in rousing interest to the point of a real serious liaison. 
The path the young woman followed is defined with clear- 
ness. In the beginning, an absorbing friendship taken up 
at first as a means of showing off a conquest before rivals; 
this languished, and all of a sudden became unattractive when 
the little man's visits found her alone with no public to ad- 
mire her triumph. We are assuming, of course, that she had 
not the faintest inclination to flirt in earnest with her com- 
panion; but if the man was skilful the moment quickly came 
when a mere friendly gossip gradually led to intimate discus- 
sion on the ways of love, the absurdities of husbands, with 
XIX [ II ] 



SOCIETY 

compromising confidences ^0M vainglorious hints on the part 
of the would-be lover, followed by more or less naive admis- 
sions of former successes from the newly married lady. Often 
she was wholly unconscious of danger, had no evil intention; 
but the spark of coquetry, never very difficult to kindle into 
flame, would suddenly take fire, her imagination would be 
stirred, and gradually the harmless badinage and fun vv^ould 
take another aspect, and another guileless spirit would be 
plunged into fathomless trouble. It is not very clear whether 
MM, de Goncourt, who give us the most interesting examples 
of these semi-platonic love affairs, think the devoted woman 
friend or the complaisant chien-de-poche kind of man the more 
dangerous confidant. What they have no doubt about ap- 
pears to be that religion, marriage, and love are equally power- 
less to influence these eighteenth century-ladies. Exceptional 
devotion in religion, deep attachment in marriage, and pas- 
sionate loyalty in love are to be found in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, but no trace of anything of the kind can be detected in 
the eighteenth. Happiness in religion was out of date; a well 
regulated aspect of mild devotion at Mass was held to be 
part of good manners, even with the indifferent and the scepti- 
cal, and it was easier to assume that aspect than to scoff. 
Happiness in marriage, said Society, was ridiculous and dis- 
tinctly plebeian. Happiness in love was unknown, and a grande 
passion, whether fortunate or the reverse, was foolishness. 
All three — religion, marriage, and love — would, in the cur- 
rent language of the time, prove to be "le neant." 

The utter absence of naturalness that we have noted be- 
fore became more and more accentuated; not a trace of real 
feeling, not a breath of freshness, not a gleam of light could 
be detected in this loaded atmosphere in which poor human 
beings groped, seeking vainly to find they knew not what, 
and drifting vainly toward their melancholy end. Of course 
this state of things reacted on the physical condition of these 
women. They suffered acutely from weakness, overstrung 
nerves, melancholia, and vapors. "Les vapeurs c'est I'en- 
nui," said Madame d'Epinay; and this although the sufferers 
were spared neither ridicule nor epigrams, and their imagi- 
XIX [ 12 ] 



SOCIETY 

nary ills were branded as affectations and exaggerations. A 
more acute observer^ suggests that they were simply suffer- 
ing intensely from the great malady of over-civilization, the 
increase of nervous disease, secret hypochondria, and, above 
all, from the terrible curse of that mysterious evil hysteria. 
The doctors now came upon the scene and insisted upon a 
change of regime. This somewhat modified the evil, and a 
more wholesome programme ensued. Fresh air was pre- 
scribed by the great Doctor Tronchin,^ and to dig in the gar- 
dens, to take violent exercise, to pursue some object, and to 
work at some occupation hitherto unknown became the order 
of the day; and these pursuits were undertaken with the 
feverish excitement Society women had formerly shown in 
ransacking their gay world in search of a new amusement 
or a new distraction. The study of science, of natural his- 
tory, of physics, even of metaphysics, filled the days and nights 
in the place of coquettish rivalries, of every form of amusement, 
and of the very fanaticism of pleasure. The mad appetite 
for pleasure was succeeded by an equal ardor for knowledge, 
and it is evident there was as little reality in this new search 
for happiness as there had been in the old. We no longer 
find the fair ladies affecting languor and exhaustion, perhaps 
having persuaded, as somebody said Madame d'Estarbey did, 
the doctor to bleed them, to give their looks a kind of delicate 
and sentimental interest; but their very attitude was changed. 
See, we now find them in a costume of stern simplicity, pale, 
with no trace of rouge, their eyes heavy with fatigue from 
brain work, the brow resting carelessly on the right hand, 
with a general look of undisturbed attention. This was, in- 
deed, a new picture, and when at last they were roused they 
were no longer to be found as of yore flitting from fair to opera, 
from jev/ellers' to milliners' shops. Now courses of political 
study, of philosophical systems, of scientific theories, took up 
the spare hours, and, scarcely less exhausted than they had 
been before with frivolity, they slept but a few hours, to re- 
sume next day their arduous and self-imposed task. 

^See Memoires de la Comtesse de Boufflers. 
"^See Les Sports dc I'Ancienne France by Jusserand. 
XIX [ 13 ] 



SOCIETY 



And now we must leave ^r French friends, and with re- 
gret we do so. There is something pathetic in the way those 
who formed French Society hastened on to their doom, in a 
wholly unconscious way. They had no suspicion of the 
coming catastrophe. It was as well they did not foresee the 
Reign of Terror; but when it came they met their fate coura- 
geously. 

We must now turn to the English compeers of the French- 
women of the seventeenth century. Here, till we get to the 
crucial point of the comparison, we shall find the task of sus- 
taining the interest somewhat difficult. For it cannot be de- 
nied that the Frenchwomen of the seventeenth century were 
more interesting than the ancestors of the Englishwomen of 
the eighteenth. During the epochs under notice, the eighteenth 
century in France and the nineteenth in England, the charm 
as in the seventeenth century remains with France until we 
get to the end of both centuries, when the likeness between 
the women of the two centuries became very close. At their 
best the English of the eighteenth century seems to be too 
nearly a replica of their French contemporaries to be very 
arresting; but it is worth considering how a certain view of 
tradition derived from the latter can be traced to the end of 
the nineteenth century. There is also the temptation to linger 
over contemporary letters and memoirs, of which we have a 
good supply. Horace Walpole, dealing out his criticism and 
sharpening his wit on Lady Mary W. Montagu's ugly man- 
ners and Lady Craven's spitefulness, brings into full light 
many details of these ladies' lives they little guessed would 
ever see the light. This rather adds to the pleasure of read- 
ing what they carefully prepared for publication, for one does 
so with a liberal discount. There are moments when Lady 
Mary fearlessly exposes the folhes of foreign Courts. "One 
foundation of these everlasting disputes," she writes, "turns 
entirely upon rank, place, and the title of Excellency"; and 
in other letters she gives a graphic description of the follies 
and futilities of English society, concerning which she seems 
to show more insight than her celebrated censor. And the 
same may be said of Lady Craven, who, however, was by no 
XIX [ 14] 



SOCIETY 

means on the same level as her rival; but if she failed, as 
Horace Walpole said she did, to understand Lady Mary's best 
points, she was her equal in accurate delineation. For in- 
stance, in her letters to the Margrave of Anspach, whom she 
afterward married, she speaks of the misrule of the unspeak- 
able Turk, of the discomfort and absurd ceremonials of the 
small Italian Courts; and the whole of her correspondence is 
seasoned with a fine insular savor of admiration for British 
freedom and British comfort, expressed in forcible and epi- 
grammatic terms. Horace Walpole might, with his exaggera- 
tion and cosmopolitanism and his surrender through old Ma- 
dame du Deffand, to French influence, almost have envied 
Lady Craven. And so it was with others in the same Society 
- — Lady Cowper, Mrs. Montague, and a long way after them 
Mrs. West and others. They give one the same impression 
of possessing considerable cultiA'ation and fine manners, but 
with stilted tediousness. Of the vein of Puritanism which 
had certainly permeated the middle class and the more re- 
tired upper class, as is shown in Rachel Lady Russell's and 
Lady Herbert's letters, etc., traces still remain in English 
Society. But it takes the light and air out of the subject, and 
confirms the impression that neither by way of contrast nor of 
likeness can the women of the eighteenth century in France 
be compared with those of the same epoch in England. 

Before we reach our friends of to-day we must give a glance 
at their immediate predecessors, their mothers and grand- 
mothers; and the experience of anyone with half a century's 
experience ought to be useful in helping us to see Society in 
the first part of this century as it really was. The great Whig 
Houses had much to say in the training of the smart world 
of those days. The traditions of perfect manners, lax morality, 
political shrewdness, excellence of taste, unrivalled skill in 
holding a salon, were handed down from mother to daughter, 
till the ebb of the tide set in during the fifties; then it is curious 
to observe the decline of each of these traditions. Who does 
not remember, if he is old enough, the courtesy without pat- 
ronage, the gentleness to inferiors, the rigorous but perfectly 
natural bearing, which never failed, however morality or re- 
XIX [ 15 ] 



SOCIETY 

ligion might fare in the da^s of his grandmothers ? When I 
was a child it appeared td^c impossible to beheve that there 
could be any other way of getting old but that with which I 
was familiar. But, full of point and amusement as were her 
sayings, merciless as she was to false fine ladyism, swift and 
cutting as were her caustic, witty snubs to both old and young, 

yet I feel when I look back that old Lady G must have 

been a milder reproduction of the preceding generation; for 
the disintegrating forces of the French Revolution were at 
work in England, and a woman whose husband knew his 
Voltaire and Rousseau by heart found the Whig edition of 
liberalism strongly tinged with ideas which could revolutionize 
in a bloodless way the exclusive aristocratic upper classes; 
while the middle classes were protected by the Puritan in- 
fluence from this disturbing agent. 

And so it came about that the puzzled, restless phase 
which came over French society at the end of the eighteenth 
century began to undermine English society in the sixties 
and seventies of the nineteenth in a dull respectable way; 
manners became democratized, salons lost their prestige be- 
cause the entertainer no longer believed in herself. Of a group 
of salons which still held their own fifty years ago, Lady Pal- 
merston's was the most successful and the most powerful 
politically, because the widest and the most cosmopolitan. 
Her charm and great distinction were unhampered by any 
shade of strictness. She had a delightful naivete in the choice 
of her political agents that would make us smile now. "I 
think," she would say, "I shall send the Flea to Rotten Row 
(a certain little Mr. Fleming, who had the art de se jau filer 
par tout), to report to me what the feeling of the country is 
on last night's debate." Her two daughters, Lady Shaftes- 
bury and the incomparably witty Lady Jocelyn, helped her 
not a little. 

Lady Granville's salon was of a different sort — more ex- 
clusive, much more affected, and frequented by foreigners. 
She had the French gift of receiving without effort. Sitting 
at work with a shaded lamp near her, she would call out with 
a word from among those passing through to the tea-room 
XIX [ i6 ] 



SOCIETY 

a friend with whom she wished to talk, and one always longed 
to hear what she was saying, for the friend on the sofa looked 
very happy and much amused; even "the lodger," Charles 
Greville, who lived on the floor above in Bruton Street, thawed 
in that corner. Of course, there was the immense advantage 
of the presence of the master of the house, who, with his won- 
derful instinct for society, rapidly arranged and rearranged 
groups, so that a bore, if such were admitted by mistake, 
found himself neutralized by being handed to some one fully 
capable of dealing with him. Lady Palmerston, Lady Gran- 
ville, and Lady Holland may be said to be the last charming 
mondaines cojivaincues, who never doubted what they should 
do and say to maintain their power. They sometimes in- 
dulged in an inner circle of intimate (small) dinners and tails 
to dinners, but, on the whole, devoted themselves mainly to 
the interest of "the party," and received all — and a very long 
list it was — ^with the most perfect manner, which was simply 
no manner at all. Each guest, young and old, left the house 
with the conviction that special attention and marked sym- 
pathy had been shown to him. 

The later attempts to fill this rdle, the grande dame hold- 
ing a salon, were not successful. Strawberry Hill had in 
Frances Lady Waldegrave's reign a reputation of its own. As 
a country house it was an amusing one to go to, though her 
receptions were a little too much of a scramble for it to be dis- 
tinguished in its jagon d'etre. The generous qualities of the 
hostess and the mixed character of her guests made up a whole 
which, as a feature of the epoch, has a special value. Yet, 
as a salon, held by a grande dame, it was beside the mark. 
The strings were beginning to get tangled and to respond no 
longer to the hand that played with them with a political 
purpose, and it failed, in spite of skilful combinations and 
strong personal influence. In later attempts the failure was 
still more marked; to watch the pulling at bell- wires that 
rang no bells became to the looker-on oppressive and some- 
times ludicrous. Before we leave the last of the salons for 
duller company, there is one personality who ought to find 
a place in a sketch, however slight, of the world in which 
XIX [17] 



SOCIETY 

Lady Palmerston and Lady Granville reigned supreme. Lady 
William Russell did n(^^ltcmpt to hold a salon; she spent 
much of her time abroad, and, when she came to England, 
lived in the simplest foreign way, her establishment consist- 
ing of few servants beyond her courier and her maid. But, 
though not attempting the role of hostess, she was almost in- 
dispensable at the salons of her friends, and still more so at 
the small recherche dinners which were the fashion among 
the creme de la crime. She was by far the strongest person- 
nality of that time, a powerful woman, powerful to violence. 
(So said rumor.) To the fascination which strength of char- 
acter gives its owner she added the charm of being so free 
from insularity and provincialism that many people were puz- 
zled as to her nationahty. Each country claimed her as its 
own. A Parisian was at once arrested by her wittily expressed 
appreciation of both ancient and modern regime, of both solid 
and frivolous literature in .France. Then she might be heard 
talking to the German Ambassador on abstruse political ques- 
tions; she was equally able, in the purest Tuscan, to discuss 
with an Italian cardinal the latest news from the Vatican. 
All this without the slightest pose or effort. She brought up 
her three sons in a way of her own, utterly unlike any English 
system of education ever heard of. A Catholic herself, she 
hated the priest, and wished to have only inscribed on her 
grave: "The mother of Hastings, Odo, and Arthur." 

We must leave these interesting personalities and pass on 
to a very dull epoch, glancing on the way at the theological 
High Church phase kindly interpreted by Miss Sewell and 
Miss Yonge. An ideal founded on the inculcation of obedience 
to the Church, instilled in brothers and cousins from Oxford, 
gave the more intelligent of the young women in the fifties 
some perception of what culture might imply; but its pur- 
suit was on the whole uninteresting, still more so were the 
lives of their frivolous sisters, made up as they were mainly 
of a great deal of silhness, of love of dress that didn't result 
in good dress, of flirtations with no background of wit, vice 
sometimes having its turn at the wheel; but even the vice 
of that period was dull. 

XIX [ i8 ] 



SOCIETY 

We have arrived at the point at which we may consider 
the question with which we started — what is common to the 
Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century and the Enghsh of 
the nineteenth — and this misgiving arises. Are not the dis- 
similarities so marked as to destroy all resemblance? Yet 
it is the one interesting point in the study, so the doubt must 
be conquered. An additional difficulty lies in the avoidance 
of any portrait-painting. Just as the roman a clef is generally 
very poor art, so in an essay, however unpretending, it would 
be odious to bolster up the interest by dealing with distinct 
personalities and not with types. Time is pressing, and some 
one else said the other day, a propos of the expression, "Now 
the psychological moment has arrived." You are talking as 
they did in the early nineties, and the types change before 
your very eyes. 

Why, ten or fifteen years ago we had the academic fad. 
The higher education of women was the cry. It touched 
Society vaguely: Lady So-and-so was determined to send 
her daughters to Girton of Newnham. The ordinary English 
and even French governesses were made to wince when com- 
parisons were made between the effect of their teaching and 
the result of a college course. In many a middle or profes- 
sional home it came as a solution to the dreary problem of how 
the girls of the family were to earn their bread, besides giving 
them the unexpected joy of finding their brains to be un- 
doubtedly fit for something. Those who hate academic train- 
ing in either men or women railed at the naij belief that to 
follow the exact curriculum which produced such poor re- 
sults in men would advance the general status of women. 
Its evident narrowness and want of elasticity could not strike 
the enthusiastic promoters of the higher education. Enthu- 
siasts are usually found to be without a sense of humor, and 
the inefficiency and defects of the women's colleges were 
scarcely apparent even to outsiders, who were, if in sympathy 
with the movement, too full of admiration for the wonderful 
energy and zeal, the untiring and self-denying devotion, of 
the founders, to find it in their hearts to criticise. They did 
not observe the deteriorating effect of the strain of over-work 
XIX [ 19 ] 



SOCIETY 

during the growing year^^ the young girls who were forced 
into competition with strong men, the majority of whom cared 
not to beat them. Every faculty was bent to the task of ob- 
taining marks. Commercially it answered to send such well- 
equipped teachers into the market, and this, in a way, met 
one of the pressing wants of the day. But later, in the homes 
of the intelligent classes, this practical solution was before' long 
pronounced to be inadequate, and disappointment was felt 
by the parents of the very hard, trenchant, cut-and-dried 
young prig who returned from time to time to the home she 
had learned to contemn. 

Now, the colleges have proved that they have to deal with 
influences more potent even than ignorance. In Society the 
ineradicable love of dress and the eternal power of physical 
beauty prevented at any time any great warmth of enthu- 
siasm in the direction of intellectual training. Men dishked 
it. They had been used to the toy and doll's house theory. 
Useless to quote women of past ages; neither men nor women 
had imagination enough to see that, with all their weaknesses, 
not to speak of their vices, the women of the Middle Ages 
were a superior kind of animal to the average Englishwoman 
of the last decade of the nineteenth century. 

The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages did far 
more to raise the status of women than any other cause at 
work since the age of chivalry, and the efforts toward intel- 
lectual discipline in our day are futile in comparison. Still 
these efforts indirectly affected later developments of women's 
energies, and may play a more considerable part in the his- 
tory of the woman of the twentieth century than we expect 
at present. 

The "new woman" followed the student, but was gradu- 
ally demolished by common consent, and the artillery spent 
in her destruction some ten years ago by such opponents as 
Mrs. Lynn Linton, of the Saturday Review, was rather a waste 
of force. 

So quickly do we move on in these days, so rapidly do 
different ideals and different ways and customs start into life 
and follow each other, that what was a true description of 
XIX [ 20 ] 



SOCIETY 

society two or three years ago may be an inaccurate picture 
now. Yet I believe that some members of each of these older 
groups survive in the present day. Such as those who led 
society before, in the main lead now; in so far as they do not, 
it is due to the uneasiness, very like that prevailing at the end 
of the eighteenth century that is beginning to show itself. 
The novelty of playing at intellectualism is beginning to lose 
its charm. Those who are born intellectual or have inherited 
literary aptitudes remain in a way masters of the situation. 
There are not many of these, and even they are amused by 
the desperate recklessness of experiment that seems to be not 
only a reaction against conventionality, but to result from a 
mad desire to exhaust every form of amusement, and indeed 
of vice. The husband-snatching, the lover-snatching — in short, 
the open profligacy — becomes unattractive because nobody is 
shocked. Gambling is resorted to, but that is such an ex- 
clusive passion that it protects its votaries from destruction 
by other forms of vice. In some cases the quality of atten- 
tion required of the gambler is intermittently applied to other 
aims, and the scholar gambler is in a fair way to become a 
type. What remains? The Kingdom of Bore. We have 
seen how the Frenchwomen, 'jin du iSieme siecle, after exhaust- 
ing every form of excitement, were found calling out for the 
neant; and the parallel is curiously close and suggestive. But 
history, as we know, does not actually repeat itself, and those 
Frenchwomen gave up trying to understand the days they 
lived in. There was a feeling of storm in the air that op- 
pressed them, and whose cause they had neither the mental 
nor moral equipment to discern. So they sat and waited 
to see what would come, and the great storm did come and 
swept them all away before they had had time to understand 
it. Here such a storm may or may not come; should it come, 
it would be met more intelligently — who knows? perhaps 
guided and directed; but what would be the outcome it is 
idle to try to predict. The older generation sometimes amuse 
themselves by conjecturing what regime will follow the 
present. 

Several thousand years ago the form of confession pre- 

XIX [ 21 ] 



SOCIETY 

scribed by the Egyptian^priests was a negative pronounce- 
ment — I have not stolen, murdered, etc., and so on, leaving 
the Deity to infer what sins have been committed. We might 
take the hint and find that a negative position has more chance 
of holding its own than a positive assertion, and the humble 
but definite aim of searching for facts, not theories, may prove 
a successful mode of arriving at something like a conclusion. 
I believe that the woman of the twentieth century will not in 
any way resemble the platforming, noisy, aggressive ladies 
of the advanced school, who may themselves be traced to 
the terrible new woman who affiicted us for a short time; 
but I also believe that the extinct woman — like Ibsen's master- 
builder's wife, Mrs. Solness — who threatened at one time to 
be rehabilitated by the force of reaction, has no chance at 
all of reincarnation. Nor do I think the courtisane de haul 
eiage doubled with the philanthropist is a type that will com- 
mend itself to English opinion, for the men held in bondage 
by her are seldom those on the first line. Nor will the scholar 
and purely literary woman, or the grande dame who dabbles 
in literature, science, and art, and leads a charming life of 
eclecticism, aestheticism, and many other isms, prevail, for 
none of these are adequate ; they are not the size, as an Ameri- 
can would say. Our successors will insist on something built 
on a larger and wider conception of life, a type higher and 
nobler, and therefore more fascinating; for, after all, there 
seems to be lacking in the very distinct types I have tried to 
sketch that great quality of charm which is all too absent from 
the ordinary Englishwoman. 

Charm ! who can define it ? It is an essence, a mystery ; 
it rules in spite of vice and wickedness, not by reason of them. 
From Helen of Troy to Mary Stuart, the women who charmed 
look out through the mist of centuries with their "basilisk 
eyes," and arrest even now those who would, if they could, 
resist their fascination. Who that has seen Sarah Bernhardt 
as Cleopatra slowly stepping from the barge toward Anthony, 
with the simple words in the golden voice, " Je suis la Reine 
d'Egypte!" who that has felt with Swinburne that Mary 
Stuart's cold cruelty prevailed not with Chastelard, for with 
XIX [22] 



SOCIETY 

her Ronsard in hand he met death with joy so that he 
might see that beautiful wicked face once more; who that has 
feh the powxr of these and other instances (why should we 
multiply them?) will deny that there is here an inscrutable 
secret ? Baffled we must ever be if we try to explain the mys- 
tery. We feel it, though we cannot analyze it. But we should 
beware of one pitfall. In this, as in all mysteries, we have 
an instance of a duality which cannot be overlooked. It is 
easy enough to consider only one side of the question. Take 
the physical side alone : it does not require the lore of a Bran- 
tome or a Boccaccio to point out that, if we do not acknowl- 
edge the power of beauty over the senses, we shall go terribly 
astray. But is this all? Surely the other aspect of the mys- 
tery inevitably must be met. The wit, the intellectual fire, 
the quickness of apprehension, what would sensual beauty 
be without these? Take them together, and you feel what 
magnetic charm may be, though you cannot explain it. The 
number of those who possess the secret is not so great in the 
present day that we need fear the subjugation of the entire 
race of man in the twentieth century. The exceptions to the 
commonplace must always be few. 

Rare instances may exist now. Let us be thankful for 
them, as we are for genius, and turn our attention to the future 
woman. The future woman! There are many burning ques- 
tions she will help to disentangle, but we cannot touch upon 
them here. Probably the improvement in her economic con- 
ditions may, as the Americans foresee, effect wonders. But 
I shall be told that I have for my ideal something made up 
of Vittoria Colonna, Diane de PoitierSj and Miss Nightingale. 
No, my aim is much more humble. I dream of a possible 
woman having something of the frank, fearless grace, the self- 
reliant daring, the open-air freedom of the Englishwoman 
of the past. Give her also charm and sympathy and capa- 
bility of deep passion, and we may find . . . but, if I do not 
take care I shall begin to predict, and I have promised not 
to do so. 



XIX [23] 



XX 



THE CHILD 

"THE BEGINNING OF THE MIND" 



BY 

H. G. WELLS 



/f RE our children getting the very best training possible 
for those trials of life which they, like the rest of us, 
must one day face? To every father and mother that question 
ranks high among the most important. Even some of us who 
are not parents may, perhaps, have recognized the value of the 
question as bearing on the future of the world, and may be willing 
to give the subject closer consideration. Is it possible that the 
way of the beast with its cub is not the best way? that intel- 
lect is better than instinct in the raising of the human young? 
The Indian mother lashed her pappoose upon her back, and there 
it hung, to live or to die as chance might fall, as the Great Spirit 
willed. We have rejected ^^ instinct,^' in that aspect at least, 
and summon intellect in the guise of learned doctors to advise 
us as to every step in our darling's physical career. But in 
matters of mentality, so far as. babies are concerned, we still 
cling to the blind method of instinct. The child learns what it 
can, what chance dictates, though these things may easily mean 
life or death to its mental and its moral being. 

Perchance we have only acted thus at hazard because along 
these lines science has offered us no positive guide. Physicians 
for the mind and soul have no such assured authority among 
us, no such positive facts upon which to act, as have their brethren 
of the body. Each of us therefore, however unwilling and in- 
competent, feels himself compelled to assume the responsibility 
XX [i] 



THE CHILD 

oj the judge, and to do jor ^k children what to him seems good. 
With most oj us, it is to be feared, this results merely in letting 
things drijt till the child is old enough to go to school. Then 
as the little one begins its second birth into the world oj books, 
we marvel to find its character already partly jormed. It is, 
we say, a bright child or a determined one. It has caught — 
jeeble verb vividly stiggestive oj our own sense oj haphazard 
helplessness — it has caught some ideas quickly, others it has 
jailed to assimilate. Heredity, which accuses our ancestors 
equally with ourselves, is a so much more comjortable explana- 
tion to ofjer jor the youngster^s jailures, than to blame them upon 
our own ignorance, misguidance, and neglect. 

Fortunately, jor our recently aiuakening consciences, science 
begins to investigate this subject along with others. The whole 
problem is as yet at an elementary stage; but no suggestions 
have been advanced more valuable than those oj Mr. H. G. Wells. 
Mr. Wells, who first became knoivn to most oj us some dozen 
years ago as a writer oj jantastic tales about the future, has grad- 
ually, with deepening interest in the social problems he por- 
trayed, abandoned the story-telling part oj his books and plunged 
ever more thoughtjully and earnestly into their philosophic side. 
To-day he stands among the most vigorous and most advanced 
oj our social teachers, an "Associe de I'lnstitut International 
de Sociologie." He preaches a "New Republicanism,^^ to which 
he makes occasional rejerence below. His "New Republicans^^ 
are to devote themselves to the juture and ignore the past, to bind 
themselves not to any single land, but to a league oj new thought 
and higher purpose extending through all lands. Perhaps 
these ideas are jancijul, but nothing could be more practical 
than his approach to the practical problem oj the conditions 
which do and which should surround the child. 



The newborn child is at first no more than an animal. 
Indeed, it is among the lowest and most helpless of all animals, 
a mere vegetative lump; assimilation incarnate— wailing. It 
is for the first day in its Hfe deaf, it squints blindly at the world, 
its limbs are beyond its control, its hands clutch drowningly 
XX [ 2 ] 



THE CHILD 



at anything whatever that drifts upon this vast sea of being 
into which it has plunged so amazingly. And imperceptibly, 
subtly, so subtly that never at any time can we mark with cer- 
tainty the increment of its coming, there creeps into this soft 
and claimant little creature a mind, a will, a personality, the 
beginning of all that is real and spiritual in man. In a httle 
while there are eyes full of interest and clutching hands full 
of purpose, smiles and frowns, the babbhng beginning of ex- 
pression and affections and aversions. Before the first year 
is out there are obedience and rebeUion, choice and self-control, 
speech has commenced, and the struggle of the newcomer to 
stand on his feet in this world of men. The process is un- 
analyzable; given a certain measure of care and protection, 
these things come spontaneously, with the merest rough en- 
couragement of things and voices about the child they are 

evoked. . 

But every day the inherent impulse makes a larger demand 
upon the surroundings of the child, if it is to do its best and 
fullest. Obviously, quite apart from physical consequences, 
the environment of a little child may be good or bad, better 
or worse for it in a thousand different ways. It may be dis- 
tracting or over-stimulating, it may evoke and increase fear, 
it may be drab and dull and depressing, it may be stupefymg, 
it may be misleading and productive of vicious habits of mmd. 
And our business is to find just what is the best possible en- 
vironment, the one that will give the soundest and fullest 
growth, not only of body, but of intclHgence. _ 

Now from the very earliest phase the infant stands m need 
of a succession of interesting things. At first these are mere 
vague sense impressions, but in a month or so there is a dis- 
tinct looking at objects; presently follow reaching and clutch- 
ing, and soon the little creature is urgent for fresh things to 
see, handle, hear, fresh experiences of all sorts, fresh combi- 
nations of things already known. The newborn mind is soon 
as hungry as the body. And if a healthy well-fed child cries, 
it is probably by reason of this unsatisfied hunger, it lacks an 
interest, it is bored, that dismal vacant suffering that punishes 
the failure of things living to live fully and completely. As 
XX [ 3 ] 



THE CHILD 

Mr. Charles Booth has pojpbtl out in his Life and Labor oj 
the People, it is probable that in this respect the children of the 
relatively poor are least at a disadvantage. The very poor 
infant passes its life in the family room, there is a going and 
coming, an interesting activity of domestic work on the part 
of its mother, the preparation of meals, the intermittent pres- 
ence of the father, the whole gamut of its mother's unsophis- 
ticated temper. It is carried into crowded and eventful streets 
at all hours. It participates in pothouse soirees and assists 
at the business of shopping. It may not lead a very hygienic 
life, but it does not lead a dull one. Contrast with its lot that 
of the lonely child of some woman of fashion, leading its beauti- 
fully non-bacterial life in a carefully secluded nursery under 
the control of a virtuous, punctual, invariable, conscientious 
rather than emotional nurse. The poor little soul wails as 
often for events as the slum baby does for nourishment. Into 
its gray nursery there rushes every day, or every other day, 
a breathless, preoccupied, excessively dressed, cleverish, many- 
sided, fundan^entally silly, and universally incapable woman, 
vociferates a httle conventional affection, slaps a kiss or so 
upon her offspring, and p^oes off again to collect that daily 
meed of admiration and cheap envy which is the gusto of her 
world. After that gushing, rustling, incomprehensible pas- 
sage, the child relapses into the boring care of its bored hireling 
for another day. The nurse writes her letters, mends her 
clothes, reads and thinks of the natural interests of her own 
Ufe, and the child is "good" just in proportion to the extent 
to which it doesn't "worry." 

The ideal environment should contain the almost constant 
presence of the mother, for no one is so likely to be constantly 
various and interesting and so untiring as she. It is entirely 
on account of this ideal environment that monogamy finds its 
practical sanction, because it insures the presiding mother 
the maximum of security and self-respect. A woman who 
enjoys the full rights of a wife without a complete discharge 
of the duties of motherhood profits by the imputation of things 
she has failed to perform. To secure an ideal environment 
for children in as many cases as possible is the second of the 
XX [4] 



THE CHILD 

two great practical ends — ^the first being sound births, for which 
the rules of sexual morality exist. 

The ideal environment should no doubt centre about a 
nursery — a clean, airy, brightly Ht, brilliantly adorned room, 
into which there should be a frequent coming and going of 
things and people ; but from the time the child begins to recog- 
nize objects and individuals it should be taken for little spells 
into other rooms and different surroundings. In the homely, 
convenient, servantless abode over which the able-bodied, 
capable, skilful, civilized women of the future will preside, 
the child will naturally follow its mother's morning activities 
from room to room. Its mother will talk to it, chance visitors 
will sign to it. There should be a pubhc or private garden 
available where its perambulator could stand in fine weather; 
and its promenades should not be too much a matter of routine. 
To go along a road with some traffic is better for a child than 
to go along a secluded path between hedges; a street corner 
is better than a laurel plantation as a pitch for perambulators. 

When a child is five or six months old it will have got a 
certain use and grip with its hands, and it will want to handle 
and examine and test the properties of as many objects as it 
can. Gifts begin. There seems scope for a wiser selection 
in these early gifts. At present it is chiefly woolly animals 
with bells inside them, woolly balls, and so forth, that reach 
the baby's hands. There is no reason at all why a child's 
attention should be so predominantly fixed on wool. These 
toys are colored very tastefully, but as Preyer has advanced 
strong reasons for supposing that the child's discrimination 
of colors is extremely rudimentary until the second year has 
begun, these tasteful arrangements are simply an appeal to 
the parent. Light, dark, yellow, perhaps red and "other 
colors" seem to constitute the color system of a very young 
infant. It is to the parent, too, that the humorous and reaHstic 
quality of the animal forms appeal. The parent does the 
shopping and has to be amused. The babyish parent who 
really ought to have a doll instead of a child is sufficiently 
abundant in our world to dominate the shops, and there is a 
vast traffic in facetious baby toys, facetious nursery furniture, 
XX [5] 



THE CHILD 

"art" cushions and "qua^" baby clothing, all amazingly 
delightful things for grown-up people. These things are 
bought and grouped about the child, the child is taught tricks 
to complete the picture, and parentage becomes a very amus- 
ing afternoon employment. So long as convenience is not 
sacrificed to the aesthetic needs of the nursery, and so long 
as common may compete with "art" toys, there is no great 
harm done, but it is well to understand how irrelevant these 
things are to the real needs of a child's development. 

A child of a year or less has neither knowledge nor imagi- 
nation to see the point of these animal resemblances — much 
less to appreciate either quaintness or prettiness. He is much 
more interested in the crumpling and tearing of paper, in the 
crumpling of chintz, and in the taking off and replacing of the 
lid of a little box. I think it would be possible to devise a 
much more entertaining set of toys for an infant than is at 
present procurable, but, unhappily, they would not appeal 
to the intelligence of the average parent. There would be, 
for example, one or two little boxes of different shapes and 
substances with lids to take off and on, one or two rubber 
things that would bend and twist about and admit of chewing, 
a ball and box made of china, a fluffy, flexible thing like a 
rabbit's tail w^ith the vertebrae replaced by cane, a velvet- 
covered ball, a powder puff, and so on. They could all be 
plainly and vividly colored with some non-soluble inodorous 
color. They would be about on the cot and on the rug where 
the child was put to kick and crawl. They would have to be 
too large to swallow and they would all get pulled and mauled 
about until they were more or less destroyed. Some would 
probably survive for many years as precious treasures, as be- 
loved objects, as powers and symbols in the mysterious secret 
fetichism of childhood — confidants and sympathetic friends. 

While the child is engaged with its first toys, and w^ith the 
collection of rudimentary sense impressions, it is also develop- 
ing a remarkable variety of noises and babblements from which 
it will presently disentangle speech. Day by day it will show 
a stronger and stronger bias to associate definite sounds with 
definite objects and ideas, a bias so comparatively powerful 
XX [6] 



THE CHILD 

in the mind of man as to distinguish him from all other living 
creatures. Other creatures may think, may, in a sort of con- 
crete way, come almost indefinably near reason (as Professor 
Lloyd Morgan in his very delightful Animal Life and Intel- 
ligence has shown) ; but man alone has in speech the apparatus, 
the possibility, at any rate, of being a reasoning and reasonable 
creature. It is, of course, not his only apparatus. Men may 
think out things with drawings, with little models, with signs 
and symbols upon paper, but speech is the common way, the 
highroad, the current coin of thought. 

With speech humanity begins. With the dawn of speech 
the child ceases to be an animal we cherish, and crosses the 
boundary into distinctly human intercourse. There begins in 
its mind the development of the most wonderful of all con- 
ceivable apparatus, a subtle and intricate keyboard, that will 
end at last with thirty or forty or fifty thousand keys. This 
queer, staring, soft little being in its mother's arms is organiz- 
ing something within itself, beside which the most wonderfully 
organized orchestra one could imagine is a lump of rude clum- 
siness. There will come a time when, at the merest touch 
upon those keys, image will follow image and emotion develop 
into emotion, when the whole creation, the deeps of space, the 
minutest beauties of the microscope, cities, armies, passions, 
splendors, sorrows, will leap out of darkness into the conscious 
being of thought, when this interwoven net of brief, small 
sounds will form the centre of a web that will hold together 
in its threads the universe, the All, visible and invisible, ma' 
terial and immaterial, real and imagined, of a human mind. 
And if we are to make the best of a child it is in no way secondary 
to its physical health and growth that it should acquire a great 
and thorough command over speech, not merely that it should 
speak, but, what is far more vital, that it should understand 
swiftly and subtly things written and said. Indeed, this is 
more than any physical need. The body is the substance and 
the implement; the mind, built and compact of language, is 
the man. All that has gone before, all that we have discussed 
of sound birth and physical growth and care, is no more than 
the making ready of the soil for the mind that is to grow therein. 
XX [7] 



THE CHILD 

As we come to this matter ^ language we come a step nearer 
to the intimate reahties of our subject, we come to the mental 
plant that is to bear the flower and the ripe fruit of the in- 
dividual life. The next phase of our inquiry, therefore, is 
to examine how we can get this mental plant, this foundation 
substance, this abundant mastered language best developed 
in the individual, and how far we may go to insure this best 
development for all the children born into the world. 

From the ninth month onward the child begins serious 
attempts to talk. In order that it may learn to do this as easily 
as possible it requires to be surrounded by people speaking 
one language and speaking it with a uniform accent. Those 
who are most in the child's hearing should endeavor to speak 
— even when they are not addressing the child — deliberately 
and clearly. All authorities are agreed upon the mischievous 
effect of what is called "baby talk," the use of an extensive 
sham vocabulary, a sort of deciduous milk vocabulary that 
will presently have to be shed again. Froebel and Preyer 
join hands on this. The child's funny little perversions of 
speech are really genuine attempts to say the right word, and 
we simply cause trouble and hamper development if we give 
back to the seeking mind its own blunders again. When a 
child wants to indicate milk, it wants to say milk, and not 
"mooka" or "mik," and when it wants to indicate bed the 
needed word is not "bedder" or "bye-bye," but "bed." But 
we give the little thing no chance to get on in this way until 
suddenly one day we discover it is "time the child spoke plainly." 
There comes an age when children absolutely loathe these 
adult imbecilities. Preyer has pointed out very instructively 
the way in which the quite sufficiently difficult matter of the 
use of I, mine, me, my, you, yours, and your is made still more 
difficult by those about the child adopting irregularly the ex- 
perimental idioms it produces. When a child says to its 
mother, "Me go mome," it is doing its best to speak English, 
and its remark should be received without worrying com- 
ment; but when a mother says to her child, "Me go mome," 
she is simply behaving stupidly and losing an opportunity of 
teaching her child its mother-tongue. 
XX [8] 



THE CHILD 

In learning to speak, the children of the more prosperous 
classes are probably at a considerable advantage when com- 
pared with their poorer fellow- children. They hear a clearer 
and more uniform intonation than the blurred, uncertain 
speech of our commonalty, that has resulted from the re- 
action of the great synthetic process of the past century upon 
dialects. But this natural advantage of the richer child is 
discounted in one of two ways : in the first place by the mother, 
in the second by the nurse. The mother in the more pros- 
perous classes is often much more vain and trivial than the 
lower-class woman; she looks to her children for amusement 
and makes them contributors to her "effect," and by taking 
up their quaint and pretty mispronunciations and devising 
humorous additions to their natural baby talk, she teaches 
them to be much greater babies than they could ever possibly 
be' themselves. They specialize as charming babies until 
their mother tires of the pose, and then they are thrust back 
into the nursery to recover leeway, if they can, under the care 
of governess or nurse. 

The second disadvantage of the upper-class child is the 
foreign nurse or nursery governess. There is a widely dif- 
fused idea that a child is particularly apt to master and retain 
languages, and people try and inoculate with French and Ger- 
man as Lord Herbert of Cherbury would have inoculated 
children with antidotes for all the ills their flesh was heir to 
— even, poor little wretches, to an anticipatory regimen for 
gout. The root-error of these attempts to form infantile poly- 
glots is embodied in an unverified quotation from Byron's 
Beppo, dear to pedagogic writers — 

"Wax to receive and marble to retain " 

runs the line — which the curious may discover to be a descrip- 
tion of the faithful lover, though it has become as firmly as- 
sociated with the child-mind as has Sterne's "tempering the 
wind to the shorn lamb" with Holy Writ. And this idea of 
infantile receptivity and retentiveness is held by an unthink- 
ing world in spite of the universally accessible fact that hardly 
one of us can remember anything that happened before the 
XX [9] 



THE CHILD 

age of five, and veiy little Uw,t happened before seven or eight, 
and that children of five or six, removed into foreign surround- 
ings, will in a year or so — if special measures are not taken — 
reconstruct their idiom and absolutely forget every word of 
their mother-tongue. This foreign nurse comes into the child's 
world, bringing with her quite weird errors in the quantities, 
the accent, and idiom of the mother-tongue, and greatly increas- 
ing the difficulty and delay on the road to thought and speech.' 
And this attempt to acquire a foreign language prematurely 
at the expense of the mother-tongue, to pick it up cheaply by 
making the nurse an informal teacher of languages, entirely 
ignores a fact upon which I would lay the utmost stress in this 
paper, which indeed is the gist of this paper, that only a very 
small minority of English or American people have more than 
half mastered the splendid heritage of their native speech. 
To this neglected and most significant limitation the amount 
of public attention given at present is quite surprisingly 
small. 

There can be little or no dispute that the English language 
in its completeness presents a range too ample and appliances 
too subtle for the needs of the great majority of those who 
profess to speak it. I do not refer to the half-civilized and 
altogether barbaric races who are coming under its sway, but 
to the people we are breeding of our own race — the barbarians 
of our streets, our suburban "white niggers," with a thousand 
a year and the conceit of Imperial destinies. They live in 
our mother-tongue as some half-civilized invaders might live 
in a gigantic and splendidly equipped palace. They misuse 
this, they waste that, they leave whole corridors and wings 
unexplored, to fall into disuse and decay. I doubt if the ordi- 
nary member of the prosperous classes in England has much 
more than a- third of the English language in use, and more 
than a half in knowledge, and as we go down the social scale 
we may come at last to strata having but a tenth part of our 
full vocabulary, and much of that blurred and vaguely under- 

* The same objection applies to the Indian ayah and the black 
" mammy," who are such kind, slavish, and picturesque additions to 
the ensemble of white mother and children. 
XX [ ID ] 



THE CHILD 

stood. The speech of the Colonist is even poorer than the 
speech of the home-staying English. In America, just as in 
Great Britain and her Colonies, there is the same limitation 
and the same disuse. Partly, of course, this is due to the petti- 
ness of our thought and experience, and so far it can only be 
remedied by a general intellectual amplification; but partly 
it is due to the general ignorance of English prevailing through- 
out the v^^orld. It is atrociously taught, and taught by ignorant 
men. It is atrociously and meanly written. So far as this 
second cause of sheer ignorance goes, the gaps in knowledge 
are continually resulting in slang and the addition of needless 
neologisms to the language. People come upon ideas that 
they know no English to express and strike out the new phrase 
in a fine burst of ignorant discovery. There are Americans 
in particular who are amazingly apt at this sort of thing. They 
take an enormous pride in the jargon they are perpetually in- 
creasing — they boast of it, they give exhibition performances 
in it, they seem to regard it as the culminating flower of their 
Continental Republic — as though the Old World had never 
heard of shoddy. But indeed they are in no better case than 
that unfortunate lady at Earlswood who esteems newspapers 
stitched with unravelled carpet and trimmed with orange peel 
the extreme of human splendor. In truth, their pride is base- 
less, and this slang of theirs no sort of distinction whatever. 
Let me assure them that in our heavier way we in this island 
are just as busy defiling our common inheritance. We can 
send a team of linguists to America who will murder and mis- 
understand the language against any eleven the Americans 
may select. 

Of course, there is a natural and necessary growth and 
development in a living language, a growth that no one may 
arrest. In appliances, in politics, in science, in philosophical 
interpretation there is a perpetual necessity for new words, 
words to express new ideas and new relationships, words free 
from ambiguity and encumbering associations. But the neolo- 
gisms of the street and the saloon rarely supply any occasion 
of this kind. For the most part they are just the stupid efforts 
of ignorant men to supply the unnecessary. And side by side 
XX [ 1 1 ] 



THE CHILD 

with the invention of infq^pr cheap substitutes for existing 
words and phrases, and infinitely more serious than that in- 
vention, goes on a perpetual misuse and distortion of those 
that are insufficiently known. These are processes not of 
growth but of decay — they distort, they render obsolete, and 
they destroy. The obsolescence and destruction of words and 
phrases cuts us off from the nobility of our past, from the severed 
masses of our race over-seas, far more effectually than any 
grov/th of neologisms. A language may grow — our language 
must grow — it may be clarified and refined and strengthened, 
but it need not suffer the fate of an algal filament and pass 
constantly into rottenness and decay whenever growth is no 
longer in progress. That has been the fate of languages in 
the past because of the feebler organization, the slenderer, 
slower intercommunication, and above all the insufficient 
records of human communities; but the time has come now — 
or at the worst is rapidly coming — ^when this will cease to be 
a fated thing. We may have a far more copious and varied 
tongue than had Addison or Spenser — that is no disaster — 
but there is no reason why we should not keep fast hold of all 
they had. There is no reason why the whole fine tongue of 
Elizabethan England should not be at our disposal still. Con- 
ceivably Addison would find the rich, allusive English of George 
Meredith obscure; conceivably we of this time might find a 
thousand words and phrases of the year 2000 strange and 
perplexing ; but there is no reason why a time should ever come 
when what has been written well in English since Elizabethan 
times should no longer be understandable and fine. 

The prevailing ignorance of English in the English-speak- 
ing communities enormously hampers the development of the 
racial consciousness. Except for those who wish to bawl the 
crudest thoughts, there is no means of reaching the whole 
mass of these communities to-day. So far as material re- 
quirements go it would be possible to fling a thought broad- 
cast like seed over the whole world to-day, it would be possible 
to get a book into the hands of half the adults of our race. 
But at the hands and eyes one stops — there is a gap in the brains. 
Only thoughts that can be expressed in the meanest common- 

XX [ 12 ] 



THE CHILD 

places will ever reach the minds of the majority of the English- 
speaking peoples under present conditions. 

A writer who aims to be widely read to-day must perpetually 
halt, must perpetually hesitate at the words that arise in his 
mind; he must ask himself how many people v/ill stick at 
this word altogether or miss the meaning it should carry; he 
must ransack his memory for a commonplace periphrase, an 
ingenious rearrangement of the familiar; he must omit or over- 
accentuate at every turn. Such simple and necessary words 
as "obsolescent," "deliquescent," "segregation," for example, 
must be abandoned by the man who would write down to the 
general reader; he must use "impertinent" as if it were a 
synonym for "impudent" and "indecent" as the equivalent 
of "obscene." And in the face of this wide ignorance of 
English, seeing how few people can either read or write English 
with any subtlety, and how disastrously this reacts upon the 
general development of thought and understanding amidst the 
English-speaking peoples, it would be preposterous, even if 
the. attempt were successful, to complicate the first linguistic 
struggles of the infant with the beginnings of a second language. 
But people deal thus lightly with the mother-tongue because 
they know so little of it that they do not even suspect their 
own ignorance of its burden and its powers. They speak a 
little set of ready-made phrases, they write it scarcely at all, 
and all they read is the weak and shallow prose of popular 
fiction and the daily press. That is knowing a language within 
the meaning of their minds, and such a knowledge a child may 
very well be left to "pick up" as it may. Side by side with 
this they will presently set themselves to erect a similar "knowl- 
edge" of two or three other languages. One is constantly 
meeting not only women but men who will solemnly profess 
to "know" English and Latin, French, German, and Italian, 
perhaps Greek, who are in fact— beyond the limited range 
of food, clothing, shelter, trade, crude nationalism, social con- 
ventions, and personal vanity — no better than the deaf and 
dumb. In spite of the fact that they will sit with books in 
their hands, visibly reading, turning pages, pencilling com- 
ments, in spite of the fact that they will discuss authors and 
XX [ 13 ] 



THE CHILD 

repeat criticisms, it is as lig^less to express new thoughts to 
them as it would ])e to seek for appreciation in the ear of a 
hippopotamus. Their hnguistic instruments are no more 
capable of contemporary thought than a tin whistle, a xylo- 
phone, and a drum are capable of rendering the Eroica Sym- 
phony. 

In being also ignorant of itself this wide ignorance of English 
partakes of all that is most hopeless in ignorance. Except 
among a few writers and critics, there is little sense of defect 
in this matter. The common man does not know that his 
limited vocabulaiy limits his thoughts. He knows that there 
are "long words" and rare words in the tongue, but he does 
not know that this implies the existence of definite meanings 
beyond his mental range. His poor collection of cvery-day 
words, worn-out phrases, and battered tropes constitute what 
he calls "plain English," and speech beyond these limits he 
seriously believes to be no more than the back-slang of the 
educated class, a mere elaboration and darkening of inter- 
course to secure privacy and distinction. No doubt there is 
justification enough for his suspicion in the exploits of pre- 
tentious and garrulous souls. But it is the superficial justifi- 
cation of a profound and disastrous error. A gap in a man's 
vocabulary is a hole and tatter in his mind; words he has may 
indeed be weakly connected or wrongly connected — one may 
find the whole keyboard jerry-built, for example, in the English- 
speaking Baboo — but words he has not signify ideas that he 
has no means of clearly apprehending; they are patches of im- 
perfect mental existence, factors in the total amount of his 
personal failure to live. 

This world-wide ignorance of English, this darkest cloud 
almost upon the fair future of our confederated peoples, is 
something more than a passive ignorance. It is active, it is 
aggressive. In England at any rate, if one talks beyond the 
range of white-nigger English, one commits a social breach. 
There are countless "book words" well-bred people never use. 
A writer with any tenderness for half-forgotten phrases, any 
disposition to sublimate the mingling of unaccustomed words, 
runs as grave a risk of organized disregard as if he tampered 
XX [ 14 ] 



THE CHILD 

with the improper. The leaden censures of the Times, for 
example, await any excursion beyond its own battered circum- 
locutions. Even nowadays, and when they are veterans, Mr. 
George Meredith and Mr. Henley get ever and again a screed 
of abuse from some hot champion of Lower Division Civil 
Service prose. "Plain English" such a one will call his de- 
sideratum, as one might call the viands on a New Cut barrow 
"plain food." The hostility to the complete language is 
everywhere. I wonder just how many homes may not be 
witnessing the. self-same scene as I write. Some little child 
is struggling with the unmanageable treasure of a new-found 
word, has produced it at last, a nice long word, forthwith to 
be "laughed out" of such foolish ambitions by its anxious 
parent. People train their children not to speak English 
beyond a threadbare minimum; they resent it upon platform 
and in pulpit, and they avoid it in books. Schoolmasters as 
a class know little of the language. In none of our schools, 
not even in the more efficient of our elementary schools, is 
English adequately taught. . . . And these people expect the 
South African Dutch to take over their neglected tongue! 
As though the poor partial King's English of the British Colonist 
was one whit better than the Taal! To give them the reality 
of what English might be: that were a different matter alto- 
gether. 

These things it is the clear business of our New Republi- 
cans to alter. It follows, indeed, but it is in no way secondary 
to the work of securing sound births and healthy childhoods, 
that we should secure a vigorous, ample mental basis for the 
minds born with these bodies. We have to save, to revive 
this scattered, warped, tarnished, and neglected language of 
ours, if we wish to save the future of our world. We should 
save not only the world of those who at present speak English, 
but the world of many kindred and associated peoples who 
would willingly enter into our synthesis, could we make it wide 
enough and sane enough and noble enough for their honor. 

To expect that so ample a cause as this should find any 
support amongst the festering confusion of the old politics is 
to expect too much. There is no party for the English language 
XX [ 15 ] 



THE CHILD 

anywhere in the world. Wj^tiave to take this problem and 
deal with it as though the old politics, which slough so slowly, 
were already happily excised. To begin with, we may give 
our attention to the foundation of this foundation, to the 
growth of speech in the developing child. 

From the first the child should hear a clear and uniform 
pronunciation about it, a precise and careful idiom and words 
definitely used. Since language is to bring people together 
and not to keep them apart, it would be well if throughout 
the English-speaking world there could be one accent, one 
idiom, and one intonation. This there never has been yet, 
but there is no reason at all why it should not be. There is 
arising even now a standard of good English to which many 
dialects and many influences are contributing. From the 
Highlanders and the Irish, for example, the English of the 
South are learning the possibilities of the aspirate h and wh, 
which latter had entirely and the former very largely dropped 
out of use among them a hundred years ago. The drawling 
speech of Wessex and New England — for the main features 
of what people call Yankee intonation are to be found in per- 
fection in the cottages of Hampshire and West Sussex — are 
being quickened perhaps from the same sources. The Scotch 
are acquiring the English use of shall and will and the confu- 
sion of reconstruction is world-wide among our vowels. The 
German w of Mr. Samuel Weller has been obliterated within 
the space of a generation or so. There is no reason at all 
why this natural development of the uniform English of the 
coming age should not be greatly forwarded by our deliberate 
efforts, why it should not be possible within a little while to 
define a standard pronunciation of our tongue. 

We have available now for the first time, in the more highly 
evolved forms of phonograph and telephone, a means of storing, 
analyzing, transmitting, and referring to sounds, that should 
be of very considerable value in the attempt to render a good 
and beautiful pronunciation of English uniform throughout 
the world. It would not be unreasonable to require from all 
those who are qualifying for the work of education the read- 
ing aloud of long passages in the standard accent. At present 
^x. [i6] 



THE CHILD 

there is no requirement of this sort in England and too often 
our elementary teachers at any rate, instead of being mis- 
sionaries of linguistic purity, are centres of diffusion for blurred 
and vicious perversions of our speech. In the pulpit and the 
stage, moreover, we have ready to hand most potent instru- 
ments of dissemination, that need nothing but a little sharpen- 
ing to help- greatly toward this end. At the entrance of almost 
all professions nowadays stands an examination that includes 
English, and there would be nothing revolutionary in adding 
to that written paper an oral test in the standard pronuncia- 
tion. By active exertion to bring these things about the New 
Republican could do much to secure that every child of our 
English-speaking people throughout the world would hear in 
school and church and entertainment the same clear and defi- 
nite accent. The child's mother and nurse would be helped 
to acquire almost insensibly a sound and confident pronuncia- 
tion. No observant man who has lived at all broadly, meet- 
ing and talking with people of diverse culture and tradition, 
but knows how much our intercourse is cumbered by hesita- 
tions about quality and accent, and petty differences of phrase 
and idiom, and how greatly intonation and accent may warp 
and limit our sympathy. 

And while they are doing this for the general linguistic 
atmosphere, the New Republicans could also attempt some- 
thing to reach the children in detail. 

By instinct nearly every mother wants to teach. Some 
teach by instinct, but for the most part there is a need of guid- 
ance in their teaching. At present these first and very im- 
portant phases in education arc guided almost entirely by 
tradition. The necessary singing and talking to very young 
children is done in imitation of similar singing and talking; 
it is probably done no better, it may possibly be done much 
worse, than it was done two hundred years ago. A very great 
amount of permanent improvement in human affairs might 
be secured in this direction by the expenditure of a few thou- 
sand pounds in the systematic study of the most educational 
method of dealing with children in the first two or three years 
of life, and in the intelligent propagation of the knowledge 
XX [ 17 ] 



THE CHILD 

obtained. There exist ali^Jy, it is true, a number of Child 
Study Associations, Parents^ Unions, and the like, but for the 
most part these are quite ineffectual talking societies, akin 
to Browning Societies, Literary and Natural History Societies: 
they attain a trifling amount of mutual improvement at their 
best, the members read papers to one another, and a few 
medical men and schools secure a needed advertisement. 
They have no organization, no concentration of their energy, 
and their chief effect seems to be to present an interest in 
education as if it were a harmless, pointless fad. But if a 
few men of means and capacity were to organize a committee 
with adequate funds, secure the services of specially endowed 
men for the exhaustive study of developing speech, publish 
a digested report, and, with the assistance of a good writer 
or so, produce very cheaply, advertise vigorously, and dis- 
seminate widely a small, clearly printed, clearly written book 
of pithy instructions for mothers and nurses in this matter 
of early speech they would quite certainly effect a great im- 
provement in the mental foundations of the coming genera- 
tion. We do not yet appreciate the fact that for the first time 
in the history of the world there exists a state of society in 
which almost every nurse and mother reads. It is no longer 
necessary to rely wholly upon instinct and tradition, there- 
fore, for the early stages of a child's instruction. We can 
reinforce and organize these things through the printed word. 

For example, an important factor in the early stage of 
speech-teaching is the nursery rhyme. A little child, toward 
the end of the first year, having accumulated a really very 
comprehensive selection of sounds and noises by that time, 
begins to imitate first the associated motions, and then the 
sounds of various nursery rhymes — pat-a-cake, for example. 
In the book I imagine, there would be, among many other 
things, a series of little versicles, old and new, in which, to the 
accompaniment of simple gestures, all the elementary sounds 
of the language could be easily and agreeably made familiar 
to the child's ears. 

And the same book I think might well contain a list of 
foundation things and words and certain elementary forms of 
XX [ i8 ] 



THE CHILD 

expression which the child should become perfecdy familiar 
with in the first three or four years of life. Much of each little 
child's vocabulary is its personal adventure, and Heaven save 
us all from system in excess ! But I think it would be possible 
for a subtle psychologist to trace through the easy natural 
tangle of the personal brier-rose of speech certain necessary 
strands, that hold the whole growth together and render its 
later expansion easy and swift and strong. Whatever else 
the child gets, it must get these fundamental strands well and 
early if it is to do its best. If they do not develop now their 
imperfection will cause delay and difficulty later. There are, 
for example, among these fundamental necessities, idioms to 
express comparison, to express position in space and time, 
elementary conceptions of form and color, of tense and mood, 
the pronouns and the like. No doubt, in one way or another, 
most of these forms are acquired by every child, but there is 
no reason why their acquisition should not be watched with 
the help of a wisely framed list, and any deficiency deliber- 
ately and carefully supplied. It would have to be a wisely 
framed list, it would demand the utmost effort of the best in- 
telligence, and that is why something more than the trades- 
man enterprise of publishers is needed in this work. The 
publisher's ideal of an author of an educational work is a girl 
in her teens working for pocket-money. What is wanted is 
a little quintessential book better and cheaper than any pub- 
lisher, publishing for gain, could possibly produce, a book 
so good that imitation would be difficult, and so cheap and 
universally sold that no imitation would be profitable. . . . 
But in this discussion of school-books and the like, we wander 
a little from our immediate topic of mental beginnings. 

At the end of the fifth year, as the natural outcome of its 
instinctive effort to experiment and learn acting amidst wisely 
ordered surroundings, the little child should have acquired 
a certain definite foundation for the educational structure. 
It should have a vast variety of perceptions stored in its mind 
and a vocabulary of three or four thousand words, and among 
these and holding them together there should be certain struc- 
tural and cardinal ideas. They are ideas that will have been 
XX [ 19 ] 



THE CHILD 

gradually and imperccptil^ instilled, and they are necessary 
as the basis of a sound mental existence. There must be, 
to begin with, a developing sense and feeling for truth and for 
duty as something distinct and occasionally conflicting with 
immediate impulse and desire, and there must be certain clear 
intellectual elements established already almost impregnably 
in the mind, certain primary distinctions and classifications. 
Many children are called stupid and begin their educational 
career with needless difficulty through an unsoundness of 
these fundamental intellectual elements, an unsoundness in 
no way inherent but the result of accident and neglect. And 
a starting handicap of this sort may go on increasing right 
through the whole life. 

The child at five, unless it is color blind, should know 
the range of colors by name and distinguish them easily, blue 
and green not excepted; it should be able to distinguish pink 
from pale red and crimson from scarlet. Many children 
through the neglect of those about them do not distinguish 
these colors until a very much later age. I think also — in 
spite of the fact that many adults go vague and ignorant on 
these points — that a child of five may have been taught to 
distinguish between a square, a circle, an oval, a triangle, and 
an oblong, and to use these words. It is easier to keep hold 
of ideas with words than without them, and none of these 
words should be impossible by five. The child should also 
know familiarly by means of toys, wood blocks, and so on, 
many elementary solid forms. It is matter of regret that in 
common language we have no easy, convenient words for 
many of these forms, and instead of being learnt easily and 
naturally in play they are left undistinguished and have to be 
studied later under circumstances of forbidding technicality. 
It would be quite easy to teach the child in an incidental way 
to distinguish cube, cyhnder, cone, sphere (or ball), prolate 
spheroid (which might be called "egg"), oblate spheroid 
(which might be called "squatty ball"), the pyramid, and 
various parallelopipeds, as, for example, the square slab, the 
oblong slab, the brick, and post. He could have these things 
added to his box of bricks by degrees, he would build with 
XX [ 20 ] 



THE CHILD 

them and combine them and play with them over and over 
again and absorb an intimate knowledge of their properties, 
just at the age when such knowledge is almost instinctively 
sought and is most pleasant and easy in its acquisition. These i 
things need not be specially forced upon him. In no way 
should he be led to emphasize them or give a priggish im- 
portance to his knowledge of them. They will come into 
his toys and play mingled with a thousand other interests, the 
fortifying powder of clear general ideas, amidst the jam of play. 

In addition the child should be able to count, it should 
be capable of some mental and experimental arithmetic, and 
I believe that a child of five might be able to give the sol-fa 
names to notes and sing these names at their proper pitch. 
Possibly in social intercourse the child will have picked up 
names for some of the letters of the alphabet, but there is no 
great hurry for that before five certainly, or even later. There 
is still a vast amount of things immediately about the child 
that need to be thoroughly learnt, and a premature attack on 
letters divides attention from these more appropriate and 
educational objects. It should be able to handle a pencil 
and amuse itself with freehand; and its mind should be quite 
uncontaminated by that imbecile drawing upon squared paper 
by means of which ignorant teachers destroy both the desire 
and the capacity to sketch in so many little children. Such 
sketching could be enormously benefited by a really intelli- 
gent teacher who would watch the child's efforts, and draw 
with the child just a little above its level. 

The child will already be a great student of picture-books 
at five, something of a critic (after the manner of the realistic 
school), and it will be easy to egg it almost imperceptibly to 
a level where copying from simple outline illustrations will 
become possible. About five, a present of some one of the 
plastic substitutes for modeling clay now sold by educational 
dealers, plasticine for example, will be a discreet and accept- 
able present to the child — if not to its nurse. 

The child's imagination will also be awake and active at 
five. He will look out on the world with anthropomorphic 
(or rather with pasdomorphic) eyes. He will be living on a 

XX [ 21 ] 



THE CHILD 

great flat earth — unless som^officious person has tried to mud- 
dle his wits by telling him the earth is round; amidst trees, 
animals, men, houses, engines, utensils, that are all capable 
of being good or naughty, all fond of nice things and hostile 
to nasty ones, all thumpaljle and perishable, and all conceiv- 
ably esurient. And the child should know of Fairy Land. 
The beautiful fancy of the "Little People," even if you do 
not give it to him, he will very probably get for himself; they 
will lurk always just out of reach of his desiring, curious eyes, 
amidst the grass and flowers and behind the wainscot and in the 
shadows of the bedroom. He will come upon their traces; 
they will do him little kindnesses. Their affairs should inter- 
weave with the affairs of the child's dolls and brick castles 
and toy foundlings. Little boys like dolls — preferably mascu- 
line and with movable limbs — as much as little girls do, albeit 
they are more experimental and less maternal in their manipu- 
lation. At first the child will scarcely be in a world of sus- 
tained stories, but very eager for anecdotes and simple short 
tales. At five I suppose a child would be hearing brief fairy- 
tales read aloud. At five it is undesirable that the child should 
have heard horrifying things and he should not be afraid of 
the dark. It is, I am sorry to beheve, very difficult to elimi- 
nate the horrors of fear absolutely from a child's life. Vul- 
garly illustrated toy-books should be guarded against. Pic- 
tures of ugly monsters will haunt imaginative children for 
years. An intelligent censorship may do much to ward off 
these sufferings until this passion of fear — so needless in the 
civilized life — begins that process of withering which is its 
destiny under our present and future securit} , Cowardly 
mothers and nurses who scuttle from cows and dogs and 
prancing horses may do infinite harm to a child by confirming 
this vestige of our animal past. The simple and obvious 
fearlessness of those about him should wean the child steadily 
from his instinctive dread of strangers and strange animals 
and strange unexpected objects and sudden loud noises. . . . 
This is the hopeful foundation upon which at or about 
the fifth year the formal education of every child in a really 
civilized community ought to begin. 
XX [ 22 ] 



XXI 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

"LANGUAGE AS THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE" 

BY 

BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 



<T^HE vast importance which the use of language assumes 
in early life is so obvious that it is usually overlooked. 
Man is so wholly a social animal thai he forgets the fact. A 
grown person who has learned our lifers elementary lessons may 
indeed abandon his kind and continue to exist, perhaps even to 
develop, in a hermifs solitude. But a six months^ babe aban- 
doned to '^nature^^ must starve or be devoured. Even conceive 
of such a child as escaping and growing up alone amid the 
beasts. He would grow up a beast — or very little more. The 
acquisition of language is thus the first great step in our mental 
development. A deaf child learns, it is true, by imitations of 
actions, and so finally may have the world of language unlocked 
to it in books. But how slow is its advance compared to that 
which is first guided by the ear, that marvelous organism, that 
intricate triumph of mechanical construction. 

Someth'mg of this immeasurable importance of language 
and the value of its systematic study has already been touched 
on by Mr. Wells in the previous address. It is here taken up 
and fully developed by President Wheeler, who ranks among 
our country^s highest authorities upon this theme, he having 
been, in earlier days, professor of comparative philology and 
professor of Greek at Cornell. For the publication of the address 
thanks are due not only to President Wheeler himself but 
also to the Editors of the Atlantic Monthly, who first printed 
and copyrighted it and by whose kind permission it is used here. 
XXI [ I ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

Blood is thicker thar\^ater, but language is more than 
blood. Let any one debate with a modern Greek the ques- 
tion of old Greek pronunciation, and undertake to show him 
by the coolest of scientific demonstration that it differed in 
essential points from the modern, and he will find he has tres- 
passed upon holy ground. Phonetic law is for these Greeks 
a pollution of the sacred temple grounds of patriotism. Belief 
in the essential identity of the modern language with the old 
stands as a fundamental article of the national faith. A Greek 
who would deny it is a high traitor. What wonder ? It is the 
birthright of its tongue which gives his people its first claim, 
if not its only claim, to recognition as a nation. 

When, on the evening of October 20, 1827, in the harbor 
of Navarino, the boom of the last cannon echoing back from 
the cliffs of old Sphakteria proclaimed the end of Turkish 
domination in the land of old time swayed by the Hellenes, 
there stood sponsorless and nameless before the nations of 
the world a population— not yet a people, but sundry scattered 
and ill-ordered groups of peoples whose habitations chanced 
to plant foundations on the sacred soil. It was the same old 
crumpled, sea-gnawed, sun-bathed Greece; but council-house 
and temple, palaestra and theatre, colonnade and college gar- 
den, were gone — all was gone that gave the ancient life of the 
dwellers in the land its outward form and semblance of a settled 
order, and made it a nation's life. Vague memories, half 
caricatured upon the traditions of a glorious past, floated 
in the air that hung over ruin and site; but where was the 
people to enter in to the inheritance, or who might claim "to 
know the manner of the god of the land" ? 

Neither the leading of goats to pasture over the slopes of 
Hymettus, the tilling of the battlefield of Mantinea, nor the 
sailing of fisher-boats through the blue waters of Salamis 
gave to men a claim on the traditions and name of the past, 
or provided a bond of union by virtue of which shepherds, 
peasants, traders, and sailors could be named a people and a 
nation. The population was of various blood — Greek, Alba- 
nian, Slavic, Prankish, Wallachian. But with all their diversity 
of blood, these men had been for once united in the sharing 
XXI [ 2 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

of a common risk and the performance of one common task 
— the expulsion of the Turk. The fact of this union in risking 
and achieving gave the impulse and the occasion to the for- 
mation of nationality; the conditions under which the union 
was inspired gave the bond its insignia and its form. From the 
hearths of the monasteries and from the lamps and altars 
of the chapels, the enthusiasm of revolt had gathered its sacred 
fire. The old Byzantine Christian Church w^as the one in- 
stitution surviving in that wasted land, not only to remind 
men of a life higher than that of "bread alone," but to main- 
tain, by even the slenderest thread, connection with a past 
that had meaning and body and purpose such as vindicate 
the existence of nationality. 

The language of the Church, kept alive in the ritual of 
the chapels and in the decadent learning of the monasteries, 
was in substance the language in which Demosthenes spoke 
and Paul wrote. Feeble as it might seem in comparison 
with the old standards, it still kept its connection with the 
old, and was capable of receiving limitless refreshment from 
the sources of the old. The various Greek patois of the peas- 
ants and villagers, on the other hand, had long since passed 
beyond the bounds of literary or national expression. They 
were now mere vanishing, enfeebled remnants of greatness, 
suited to the chatterings of goatherds and children and the 
hagglings of petty traders, or the chantings mayhap of the 
folk, but incapable of giving an expression to the wants and 
aspirations of a nation or of a people that had part in 
the doings of the great outer world. The same was true of 
the Albanian patois spoken by large masses of the population, 
and especially by most of the sailor-folk whose prowess on the 
sea had carried no small part of the burden of war. So it fell 
out that the new national consciousness arising from the ashes 
of the Revolution clothed itself in the language of the Church 
which erstwhile had been the nation. The Greek patois were 
lifted through this higher type of the language into the channels 
of connection with the old Greek speech that once had been 
the vehicle of a world-civilization, and a modern Greek, in 
outward form at least, half ancient, half recent, arose as the 
XXI [3] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

standard language of Ihc^tw nation, and became at once its 
educator, its voice, and its emblem. In form, in manner, 
in materials, it stands a living monument to the methods and 
the spirit in which the Greek nationality of the nineteenth 
century was requickcned and reestablished from the scanty 
remnants of the old. Even when it drapes the classical hima- 
tion over the vulgate trousers and waistcoat of to-day in what 
seems fantastic masquerading, it pays thereby its tribute to 
the weirdly sentimental spirit of Philhellenism that has 
helped to make and maintain the state. 

The lesson taught here in the small has, like so many of 
the products of this little land, its larger lesson in terms of 
greater things. Every standard language, as distinguished 
from local folk-speech and dialect, has been in the his- 
tory of the world the exponent of some special movement 
in intercourse and civilization, the garb of some special type 
of human culture, the voice of some special form of instituted 
order among men — commercial, political, religious, or cul- 
tural. The very genius of a standard makes it something 
extended beyond its natural habitat to serve the conveniences 
of a wider intercourse. The standard divisions of time which 
deal in multiples like 12, 60, 360, hark back to the old Chal- 
dean astronomers, from v\^hom came the "60 minas make a 
talent," as well as the gross and the quire. Wherever 60 
seconds make a minute the ancient empire of Mesopotamia 
has not utterly ceased to be. The conflict of the metre and 
the foot is still in substance a contest between the innovating 
Frenchman and the sturdy conservatism of English influence. 

Latin, once the speech of a petty district by the Tiber, 
became the standard medium of intercourse for a mighty em- 
pire, absorbed into itself the spirit of the institution, became 
its outward embodiment, and survives to-day as a monument 
to the essential character of that institution better and truer 
than Colosseum or Forum. Its present place in education, 
in literature, in law, is determined by the place that Rome 
still holds in the organized life of Europe and in all organized 
life whose sources are in European civilization. A visible 
emblem is the place it still holds as the language of the Ro- 
XXI [ 4 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

man Church; for the Roman Church is in all reality the Roman 
Empire expressed in terms of the things of the soul. The 
schoolboy learns from his Latin, if he learns it well, more than 
words, rules, paradigms, maxims, bits of history, or scraps 
of mythology; he drinks in the life of old Rome and the spirit 
of its institutions, — law, order, organization, authority. There 
is nothing left us, now that the Romans are gone, so Roman 
as Latin. 

What Latin is to the Roman Church Sanskrit is to the 
Brahmin. Two thousand years and more ago it parted com- 
pany with the vernacular, and ever since has been maintained 
as a more or less artificial standard, serving to express and 
embody the culture which made the classical age and literature 
of India. What the Romanic languages are to Latin, the various 
Prakrits of India are to Sanskrit ; and one of these in particular, 
the Pali, as the language of the earliest Buddhistic writings, 
has becom.e a standard, lifted above time and habitat, and is 
the distinctive idiom of Buddhism. 

When, with the emergence of a national spirit in the form 
of the Protestant Revolution, German speech in the sixteenth 
century pushed its way through the crust of Latin that had 
hitherto overspread the entire literary expression of the land, 
there was no German language; there was only a tangle of 
local dialects, none of which had been deemed worthy of con- 
veying a message to Germany at large, few of aught else than 
the quick-vanishing message of the lips, and that in the common 
homely matters of e very-day village life. In the fire and zeal 
of a great national uprising, of a struggle that was a battle of 
language standards as well as of creeds, the German language 
sprang into existence. It cam_e in response to a need, but it 
was men, and the message of men to men struggling for ex- 
pression, that made it. The idiom which carried the burden 
of the great controversy melted with the heat of conviction, 
and moulded itself into the form of a language that could 
voice the thought of a whole people. 

The conquest of Italy made Latin, the crystallization of 
the Brahmin caste made Sanskrit, the preaching of Buddha 
made Pali, the dominance of Attic standard Greek over all 
XXI [ 5 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

the dialects of Greece is a^flcction of Athens's fourth-century 
dominance in the sphere of thought and art, the modern Greek 
is daughter of the Revolution, German as a nation's speech 
is an outgrowth of Luther's Reformation. Most great standard 
languages will be found to have taken their rise in some move- 
ment of human interest that stirred the lives and thought 
of men toward a larger sympathy and a larger intercourse 
than the things of village, clan, or cult demanded. It is the 
same class of movements which have begotten nationalities, 
at least the nationalities of the modern type. 

The ancient state was founded upon religion, and the bond 
of religion was in its genesis a bond of blood. The mod- 
ern state tends to obscure the bonds and boundaries of blood 
and to substitute for them the ties of common interest and 
common conditions. Trade, intercourse, like customs, like 
forms of life, like forms of belief, like forms of thought, count 
more than blood. And so it comes about that more and more 
as the world grows riper the paths of nationality and of lan- 
guage unite. What levels the way for the one gives life and be- 
ing to the other. The oldest state is the tribe, and its watch- 
word is blood; the modern state is the nation, and the emblem 
which the course of history is choosing for it unmistakably 
is language. The toils and trials of a quasi-nation like Austria- 
Hungary, with its plurality of tongues, only prove the rule. 
What we have here is a refuge, not a nation. 

But a national language is more than an emblem; more 
than a flag or a coat of arms ; more than a monument to a great 
historic nation-making act, which may serve as a rallying 
point for patriotism and the sentiment of nationality. It is 
all that, but it is thousandfold more. A written creed or con- 
stitution which cannot be amended or reinterpreted may stand 
as a landmark and a sacred relic, and appeal to the reverence 
and even the affection of men; but a very different thing it 
is from a body of usage and precedent fashioned in historic 
testings, such as is the English constitution. That bears 
within itself at any given time a record of past experience 
in composite. A man's character at any given time is said 
to be the resultant of all the conscious choices of his life. Mis- 
XXI [6] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

takes have left their scars, self-denials have toughened the 
fibre of the will, lies have left behind them perverted vision 
of the truth, deeds of mercy have made their deposit of merci- 
fulness. 

Language is of like sort with character. Every speaker 
in all the generations, in every word he has uttered, has helped 
to build it. Light-winged words, they sped through the 
barriers of the lips, but could not be lost. They either tended 
to strengthen the standing norm — and that either in hearer, 
speaker, or both — or they played their part in starting diver- 
gence and change or in loosening the foundations of the norm. 

The crude methods of the new-born science of language 
are as yet but playing with the pebbles on the shore of a mighty 
deep. We read of etymologies, but they only tear away with 
tumbrous hand the silken warp from the cocoons of words, 
and miss the pattern and the motive of the weaving, and ignore 
the life within. Words are not words without context, motive, 
and life. Synonyms galore printed in Italics cannot compass 
a description of their life-values. The clumsy devices of letters 
cannot yield a vision of even their bodily form. To know them 
really one must know them warm — warm with the life-blood 
of actual living speech; one must have met them under every 
variety of life-conditions; one must have "summered and 
wintered" with them. 

We arrange them in paradigms, and think we have compass- 
ed and measured them; but these paradigm pigeonholes only 
betray the limitations of our own petty logic. We try to cram 
words into compartments under our so-called rules of syntax, 
and the splendid failure which results offers the finest demon- 
stration of the narrow range of reason as compared with the 
great background of soul -life, the vast reaches of the divine 
indefinite. 

Grammar is to the average healthy human being the driest 
and deathliest of all the disciplines. Except as it serves a tem- 
porary practical purpose of offering a first approach to the 
acquisition of a language, or of presenting to maturer study 
a convenient tentative and artificial classification of certain 
facts, it brings spiritual atrophy and death to him who gives 
XXI [ 7 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

and him who takes. Trnp^ed as an end unto itself, it desic- 
cates teacher and pupil alike. The fact requires neither 
demonstration nor illustration. The reason for it, too, is not 
far to seek. Grammar represents the application of a method 
that is lifeless to a subject-matter that is life, and the discrep- 
ancy between the method and the matter determines the spirit- 
ual revulsion against the former. It is a case of inevitable 
and eternal misfit. Grammar as we practise it is derived 
from the Sophists and the Stoics, and is still, however much 
we try to disguise the fact, based upon a confidence in logic, 
or something in the ordering faculties of the intellect close akin 
thereto. But language, which is the property of life and 
personality in the w^hole, will not yield its secret to the meagre 
analyses of reason and intellect, which are by their nature 
partial, wdiich see as in a glass darkly, and not face to face. 
Language cannot be unlocked by logic; it can be unlocked 
only by sympathy. 

It would not be my purpose to deny for a moment the 
possibility of a science of language or to question its utility; 
far from it. As little would I undertake to deny the possibil- 
ity of a science of theology, merely because it fails, as it notably 
does, to cover and represent the facts of living faith. But 
what we must recognize, what we must in honesty confess, 
though it gives us pain to do it, is that the finest endeavors 
of the finest scientific grammar, Hke all other processes which 
apply the purely objective tests to the products of life, and pre- 
eminently of soul-life, can only serve at the best as correctives 
and stimulants of vision in detail; they cannot induct any 
human being into real understanding and appreciation of the 
life of the whole. Learn and know Meyer's Grammar and 
the Kiihner-Blass from title-page to index, and what a pitiful 
travesty that by itself would yield upon a real sympathy with 
the magnificent idiom in which- — not merely through which 
by its content of idea, but in which itself — Sophocles conveys 
the touch of the Hellenic fervors and unfolds the Hellenic 
attitude toward the universe of being: love, awe, joy, hope, 
regret, simplicity, harmony, beauty, temperance. 

If language were a mass of conventional cipher, like a 
XXI [ 8 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

Volapiik or the price-marks of a secretive hardware shop; if 
the ordering faculties that haunt the superficies of mind had 
dominated it entire and formed it, as they have the price-marks, 
then would there be some hope for grammar. A grammar of 
Volapiik is an eminently satisfactory thing. A code telegram 
can be translated by purely mechanical processes. The trans- 
lation, however, of a literary masterpiece, in which language 
is at the highest flush of vitality, is one of the severest and most 
evasive tasks to which human endeavor can address itself. 
You can transfer patches of flesh and skin, and even infuse 
blood, but you cannot transfer life from one body to another. 
Words do not live in dictionaries any more than plants in 
herloariums. They live in the usage of living men. Every 
word, every phrase, has it subtle, unanalyzable coloring, de- 
rived from myriad associations in myriad sentences, as im- 
possible of summary and final description as a personality. 

A word has a personal character, and wherever it goes 
it carries like a human being its character with it; so that in 
every use of it there is implicit the power and the possibility 
of standing for vastly more than the special emergency seemed 
at first to demand. Jest and poetry depend for much of 
their flavor, as did old-fashioned town-meetings, upon this 
habit of taking along the entirety of individual character. 
Put language under the same severe restraints which depress 
personality and turn the town-meeting into a battalion of sol- 
diers, and you have the prose of the law-code and the auction- 
eer's catalogue. But poetry, which always antedates prose, 
as the Vedic hymns antedate the Brahmanas, and Homer and 
the dramatic poets the orators, is far more in accord with the 
inner spirit and purpose of speech than is prose. Language is 
indeed, as Emerson said, only "fossil poetry." 

Language is through and through a social product. Schlei- 
cher, the fine old botanist-philologist of Jena, tried his best 
in vain to apply to it the analogies of his flower-beds and kitchen- 
garden. Stammbaums and branches have gone the way of 
roots and stems. The laws of sound-change, instead of being 
like the laws of nature governing the growth of plants and the 
revolving of planets, prove to be founded on the tendency to 
XXI [ 9 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

social compromise, in thc^^xcssity which men are under of 
getting along together anc^nderstanding one another, and re- 
semble, therefore, the laws which govern dress-coats, dinner- 
calls, the holding of forks, and the wording of wedding-cards. 

Even in the outward characteristics of their structure, 
languages represent in the grand style of summary the domi- 
nant social conditions in the history of those peoples who 
speak them. Thus, at one end of the line stand the so-called 
agglutinative languages, at the other the monosyllabic. The 
agglutinative languages, of which the Bantu tongues of Africa 
and the Mongolian of Central Asia afford illustration, represent 
the experience of widely scattered populations which main- 
tain over a vast extent of territory a desultory communication 
with one another. Corresponding to the necessities of the case 
which demand that every idea and phase of idea be explicitly 
indicated, these languages are perfectly transparent; that is, 
perfectly "regular" in structure. Like modifications of ideas 
are always expressed by like inflexional elements. Little or 
nothing is left to be inferred. Every division and subdivision 
of the thought is duly tagged and labelled. 

The Chinese goes to the other extreme. Here almost 
everything is implicit. Far more is left to be inferred from 
context, word-order, and intonation than is really presented 
in bodily form. The monosyllabic dabs in which the China- 
man speaks are mere running hints — a shorthand of speech 
condensed to the uttermost. They are the natural products 
of a stable, long-established, densely-compacted civilization, 
in which unwritten precedent outweighs written statutes; in 
which multifold social compromise has finally made life ar- 
tificial in place of natural, and its acts symbolic rather than 
presentive. The monosyllabic languages have been pro- 
duced under tremendous social pressure. They represent, from 
the artistic as well as the historical point of view, the most finish- 
ed type of human speech. The maximum of idea is implicit 
in their structure. They contain the minimum of mechanism 
for the maximum of expression. 

We might multiply illustrations of the way in which lan- 
guage, sensitive as milk to its environment, takes upon it 
XXI [id] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

the impress of social conditions as they develop and pass. 
The modern rapid development of intercourse is, for instance, 
making itself slowly but irresistibly felt in dulling the colors 
which mark the linguistic areas on the map of the civilized world. 
Not only interchange of loan-words, but in far subtler form 
the acceptance of common syntactical moulds, is gradually 
lifting the great European culture-languages toward the levels 
of a common medium of communication. While the question 
whether English, French, Russian, is to become the universal 
language is awaiting the slow unfolding of political and commer- 
cial history, this deep and subtle drift into unity is steadily 
advancing toward a distant goal. It means no more than that 
the languages, in their chameleon habit, are taking on the 
colorings of internationalism. 

Man is first and foremost a social being. Language is 
the social bond, and therefore man's badge of membership 
in the body social; but more than that, it is the embodiment 
of the nature and spirit of that social fabric to which the in- 
dividual owns allegiance, and through which he becomes 
a man. If that social spirit is the logos, then language is the 
logos made flesh. Man as a member of society is assigned 
to his place and is made by the language he commands. More 
or less unconsciously we even locate men by the language 
they use. So fine and exacting are our tests, for instance, 
that one who is to command a hearing as representative of a 
type of the higher civilization of a nation must, on platform or 
in pulpit, speak in the recognized standard of that civilization. 
The dialectal colorings of province and district, much as 
they may delight us in other ways and for other purposes, carry 
insensibly with them the impression of limitation and provin- 
cialism. Through the language a man speaks, or the form_ 
of it he uses at any given time he betrays the scheme of human 
culture and the order of human society with which at the moment 
he is in sympathy. 

These considerations concerning the place and meaning 
of language in human society determine what we believe is 
its place and meaning in the education of mankind. Through 
language, nations in the modern sense are made and held to- 

XXI [ II ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

gethcr. Through languagc^jpe individual is h'fted into member- 
ship in the nation. The child comes into the world and finds 
a language awaiting him. The acquiring of that language con- 
stitutes his first education. Compared with this all other educa- 
tion is of entirely secondary importance. Observation of the 
processes by which a child acquires its mother tongue teaches 
that it is not the language which is drilled into the child's mind, 
but it is the child's mind which is fitted into and expanded 
into the language. Words and expressions come to the child, 
not as full and finished globules of thought, but as empty 
shells which he must fill with idea, as spools on which he must 
wind the warp of thought. Words are not defined for the 
child. If they were, he could not understand. He must 
learn their various uses from single experiences, and by slow 
and gradual processes arrange the concepts, which by asso- 
ciations, metaphors, and metonymies cling together in 
the mind and usage of the language community, into their 
compact place within the shell or about the spool. In 
doing this he is coming into possession of the folk-wisdom 
of the folk; he is coming into accord with the mind of the 
historic-social body of which he is to be a member; he is learn- 
ing to estimate and quote the values of the world in terms 
of the standard coinage of his place and time; he is making 
himself standing ground in human society ; he is forming and 
building a pou sto for the exercise and development of his 
free personality. Without school or school-master, text-book 
or pedagogue, the child and then the man are brought before 
the seat of the greatest and wisest teacher their lives are ever 
in all their scope to have, and this teacher is their mother 
tongue. It is a teacher whose learning they are never to ex- 
haust, and whose stimulating influence toward mental growth 
is not likely soon to fail. Happy are they who are born into 
the inheritance of a speech developed and enriched by highest 
literary use and by long traditions of noble expression; for 
then it will be a teacher to age as well as to youth. Happy 
are they who, through the formal education of the schools, are 
brought into touch with the life attitude of other peoples as 
embodied in their languages, and especially of those peoples 

XXI [ 12 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

whose spiritual life has blended into the early currents of our 
own. 

It is particularly, however, for the years of earlier mental 
development that language plays its chief involuntary part 
as educator. That which it does now without conscious 
direction provides the basis and guidance for use in formal and 
systematic education. It points the way to what is the prime 
consideration in education, even if it does not swallow up and 
include all others. 

We educate a human being to the end that his personality 
may most nearly fulfil its inherent possibilities within the 
human society of which it is to be a part. We do not seek 
primarily, if we are wise, to fill the mind with various knowledge; 
for we know that the mind is not so much a reservoir as a 
mill-wheel, not so much a storehouse as a laboratory, not 
so much a receptacle as an instrument. We do not, if we 
are wise, rear the child in isolation from life or in untamed 
individualism; for we know that man is born to live in society, 
and that society is historically conditioned, and that the life 
man lives is part of a succession — a historical life. 

What we really do first of all, if we are wise, is to take the 
budding bit of individuality in hand, and induce it, constrain 
it, persuade it, cajole it, overawe it, and, if need be, spank it, 
into recognition of the existing order. The first thing a child 
has to learn is to do as it is told to do. To become a historical 
being is its mission, and as soon as possible it must recognize 
the authority of the historically constituted order. The ac- 
ceptance of the authority of society is the gate through which 
one passes into freedom. The stern law it is, like the rough 
hand of the paidagogos, that leads us unto Christ ; it is through 
obedience and conformity to the spirit that dominates the world 
that we come to a realization of ourselves, and to our birthright 
of freedom as sons of God. In the isolation of selfhood we 
sit without the pale and yearn for the husks the swine eat, but 
once we have set our faces toward home and order there is 
enough and to spare. This is what is meant, alike in the 
statutes of society, in the constitution of the state, and in the 
oracles of God, by the "consent of the governed." 
XXI [ 13 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

It is the mission of la^i^age and literature in education 
to bring young individual life into accord with the moulds 
of historical life. Through word and phrase and sentence, 
through tale and myth and verse, mind is quickened to enter 
in and occupy these nests and shells that have sheltered other 
human thought. Mind is expanded in the moulds of mind; 
not in the lifeless geometric cells of logic and reasoning, but in 
the life-cells shapen to contain the products of the soul — the 
whole, the living soul. 

The practically logical mind is a healthy, well-nourished 
mind — nothing more or less. Such mind is produced by 
feeding it during the years of development upon healthy normal 
food, not upon the embalmed food of the logicians or the chem- 
ists. The Chinese mandarins, trained upon language and 
innocent of pure logic, are said to be the keenest practical 
logicians of the world. The forms of reasoning, indeed, to 
which a child is stimulated in catching the meanings of sen- 
tences of the mother speech, or which a boy uses in making out 
the meaning of a sentence in his Csesar from the imperfect data 
of words and syntax, are the forms of contingent reasoning, 
the ones which are almost exclusively employed in the deci- 
sions and judgments of actual life. Men who pretend to reg- 
ulate their lives according to well-constructed syllogisms — 
and it must be pretence or self-deception, for there are no 
such syllogisms in life — are generally regarded as impossible 
men. They are what are politely known as cranks. 

The methods of thought which are based upon objective 
tests, and which, whether applied in the field of the human- 
ities or of nature studies, we call scientific, have their place in 
education as well as those we have discussed; but in elemen- 
tary education they are to be introduced gradually, and as 
correctives rather than as staples. Nature study need not be 
scientific any more than language study. We are not concern- 
ed here with any conflict between the study of nature and the 
study of the humanities, nor are we making protest against 
the scientific method of studying either; we are insisting merely 
upon the educational value that inheres in the direct study of 
language and of language as literature. 
XXI [ 14 ] 



LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 

Literary training can never be disjoined from language 
study. There never was a suggestion more perverse than 
that which recommends the substitution of translations for 
originals, on the theory that all the great and choice ideas 
can thus be exploited as well as through the toil of learning 
the language. What, pray, are these ideas? Why not pick 
them out, arrange them alphabetically by initial words, and 
print them in double columns like market-lists? The rea- 
son straight and simple is that they are inseparable from the 
language. Language is no mere vehicle. It is itself in large 
part its own content. 

The main educative purposes of literary study and of 
language study are, in the end, one and the same. They ap- 
proach the mysteries of the folk-mind directly. They deal face 
to face with the soul and its expression. Contact and sympathy 
are their instruments ; not the lens, the scalpel, and the syllogism. 
They throw wide open the window and look straight out into 
life and the day. 

So long as intimations of the larger life, the life social and 
the life spiritual, have power to call man out of himself and his 
cell, these studies have their place in the schooling of mankind ; 
for the reach of the soul is higher than the clutch of the hand. 



XXI [15] 



XXII 



THE BOY 

"HIS PREPARATION FOR MANHOOD" 

BY 

DANIEL COIT OILMAN 

FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY AND OF THE CARNEGIE 

INSTITUTION 



'T^HE name of Daniel Coit Gihnan has long ranked among 
the very foremost of American educators and scholars. 
Five years ago he resigned his position at the head of the world- 
renowned university of Johns Hopkins, having assumed the 
presidency of the Carnegie Institution, which was then established 
in Washington for the advancement of scientific research. This 
distinguished office he resigned in 1904 at the approach of age; 
hut he still remains an official connection with both institutions. 
Perhaps in all our land there is no man who has had such long, 
such wide, and such varied experience as Dr. Gllman with boys, 
and with young men just ceasing to he hoys. Therefore his words 
upon this subject must have a permanent value and interest for 
us all. 

Our previous address dealt with the child, the problems that 
surround his earliest days, the mists in which his emerging mental 
power is involved, and through which, seeking to guide him, we 
grope blindly. As he advances into boyhood his steps grow 
firmer, the enwrapping mist less dense. Something of vagueness 
must always intervene, hiding each human personality from all 
the rest, yet as the child learns to talk and to think he begins to 
bridge the gap which holds his mind secreted from older minds. 
He analyzes himself in some crude way, and so helps us to analyze 
XXII [ I ] 



THE BOY 

him. Moreover, as Dr. Gil0^n well points out, memory, each 
man's memory oj his own boyJiood, scarce reaching back below iJie 
age of five or ten, still further enables us to understand. Hence the 
chief problems which confront most boyhoods are well known. 
They can be faced and fought. Much help, very much help in- 
deed, can he given to the lad in solving his own problems. And 
alas, so m,uch is needed, so much more even than we can give! 
To start "right^' upon one's manhood is no easy task. There are 
so many hampering habits easily acquired, so many pitfalls every- 
where ensnaring, so many follies, so many vices. 

While the difficulties stand out clearer than those of childhood, 
the problems are more serious; they loom larger and seem far more 
doubtful of solution. The child yields to control, but with spring- 
ing youth the hand of guidance is thrown aside. The fences are 
broken down, the young steer will to the meadow, the young blood 
will to the fray. Let us seek such knowledge on the subject, such 
assistance in handling our own, as one man's venerable thought 
and experience can offer. 

I AM not sure that people are agreed upon the Hmits of boy- 
hood. Shakespeare divides life into seven ages, of which the 
second is "the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining 
morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school," and 
other writers regard with a superstitious reverence the multiples 
of seven, as climacterics leading up to " the grand climacteric " of 
nine times seven ; but I prefer to count the first twenty or twenty- 
one years as those of boyhood; then comes early manhood — 
another twenty years ; the third score is that of middle age and 
maturity, and the fourth, of seniority. It is only centenarians 
who can truly be called old in these days which have so recently 
known a Gladstone, Manning, Ruskin, Tennyson, Bismarck, 
Moltke, and a Kaiser Wilhelm; octogenarians and nonagena- 
rians are only in advancing years. At Commencements, gray- 
haired men who have grandsons in college allude to their class- 
mates as "the boys," and appear to think that calling a man 
young makes him so. But the boys I am to speak of have not 
been to college; they are under their majority, and most of them 
less than eighteen years of age. I refer to the boys of Berkeley, 
xxn [2] 



THE BOY 

of Exeter, of Andover, of St. Paul's, of Norwich, of Lawrence- 
ville, and of hosts of other schools. I do not refer to the ghosts 
of boys, Hke one that went the rounds with Doctor Kolmes when 
he returned, after fifty years or so, to the scenes of his youth and 
the academy in Andover. " The ghost of a boy was at my side," 
he says, "as I wandered among the places he knew so weU." 
The ghost went with him even to the railroad station. " Give 
me two tickets to Boston," said the Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table; but the Httle ghost repHed, "When you leave this place 
you leave me behind you." " One ticket, then, to Boston," said 
the tale-teller; " and good-bye, little ghost." 

But in reahty do men ever say good-bye to " the httle ghost " ? 
Is he not with us night and day, summer and winter, all our lives 
through, and are we sure that even death will part us from him ? 
Ask the older men of your acquaintance and see if the ghost of a 
boy is not always near by. Ask even Doctor Holmes — if only 
one could stiU ask him "over the tea-cups" — if the ghost of a 
boy whom he left at the Andover station did not fly through the 
air and meet him when he reached his house on Beacon Street. 
Ask him if the httle ghost has never appeared in Cambridge or 
in Berkshire — yes, ask him if the ghost is not always with him, 
sometimes a recording angel, and sometimes a prophet of im- 
mortahty. 

Is it not worth while for us older people to tell the boys that 
a httle ghost will always keep them company — that as they grow 
older he will remind them perpetually of the past; every pecca- 
dillo will be remembered, and all healthy, honest deeds will be 
treasured in the cells of memory " to be used as directed " ? 

During recent years there have been some very curious 
studies respecting the natural history of boys. Mr. HoweUs, 
the novehst, has written a book that he calls A Boy's Town, and 
in its pages he dehneates with the reahstic touch of a master the 
thoughts of a boy between his third and his eleventh year, who 
grew up in a country town on the Miami River. Literature is 
full of autobiographies, but here we have something quite un- 
usual, something quite fresh in the Hterature of childhood. It 
is a picture drawn with accuracy by a writer while still young, of 
the environment in which he was brought up. Here we may 
xxn [3] 



THE BOY 



learn what an American b^gurmised, discovered, and believed 
in respect to the world in wmch he was placed. 

By a curious coincidence, whether conscious or unconscious I 
cannot say, a celebrated French writer, whose no7n de plume is 
Pierre Loti, has drawn a companion picture to that of Howells. 
In these two books we may compare the Huguenot and the 
American. The Frenchman, with a lively imagination and a 
love of adventure, was subjected to the depressing influences of a 
French country town. On the prairie all was freedom ; in the 
province all was restraint. But we see how both natures rose 
above their belongings, how the self-determining power of the 
will made them both keen observers, graceful narrators, dis- 
tinguished novehsts. 

One of the most remarkable studies of the inherent tendency 
of boys to organize society may be found in a paper entitled 
"Rudimentary Society among Boys," that was written some 
time ago by Mr. J. Hemsley Johnson, a connection of Reverdy 
Johnson, the Maryland statesman. In this paper we have the 
story of the hfe among the McDonogh school boys, in their 
country home a few miles from Baltimore. Several hundreds of 
acres, with predominant woodlands, belonged to the school, but 
the boys thought thct the land and all that grew or was nourished 
upon it belonged to them ; so they established their rights to the 
walnut trees and the birds' nests, and afterward to the portions 
of cultivated grounds. The germs of civilized society were soon 
developed. "No right without its duty, no duty without its 
rights." Authority, law, penalty, inheritance, trade, circulating 
medium, were all evolved by the boys. 

Doctor Stanley Hall has published a kindred memoir, in 
which he has described the amusements of children. He calls 
his paper "The Story of a Sand Pile." 

Perhaps we are coming'to the time when the comparative bi- 
ography of boys will take its place beside the comparative history 
of nations and the comparative geography of lands. We shall 
not only be able to distinguish how boys differ from men, and 
how their ways differ from those of girls ; but we may learn how 
boys differ from boys, at different periods, in different families, 
with different talents and with different hopes and expectations. 
XXII [ 4 ] 



THE BOY 

Boys may be classified into genera and species, not according 
to what they know, but according to what they are. The school 
affords an easy method of placing them in forms, grades, classes 
— almost as exact as that of the tailor who places them in coats of 
different sizes — but what a boy has learned is only one element in 
an estimate of his worth. It is more important to discover 
what are his capacities, to what intellectual and moral group he 
belongs ; what are his tendencies toward nodosities that must be 
counteracted ; what are his aptitudes to be cultivated ; what arc 
the habits that must be regulated so that they shall be helps and 
not hinderances in the battle of life. 

With all the accumulated experience of mankind it is still 
extremely difficult to foretell what a boy will become. It is 
possible to predict the speed that a thoroughbred colt will ap- 
proximate, as Professor Brewer has shown, or to anticipate the 
quality of a terrier or a pointer, of an Ayrshire or a Durham ; but 
who is wise enough to discover in the nursery the coming states- 
men, poets, scholars, and divines, or even to foretell what quali- 
ties will be developed in any group of schoolboys? Who can 
estimate the power of the individual, the self, the ego, that dvv'clls 
in each bodily frame, and asserts in the course of life its 
supreme authority ? One of the most impressive sermons deliv- 
ered by Charles Kingsley in Westminster Abbey was a sermon 
on the monosyllabic, the monogram, I. 

No parent, no teacher, no physician, no philosopher is wise 
enough to speak infallibly upon such important questions. 
There are no logical formulas, no canons of criticism, no physio- 
logical tests by which conclusions may be reached. Neverthe- 
less, there are signs and tokens which indicate the probabilities, 
and by these the wise instructor, the observing mother, the pru- 
dent father will be guided. 

One way of arriving at a knowledge of boys is by reminis- 
cence. Old men like to renew their youth by retrospection. 
They imagine themselves young because they recall so vividly 
the days of their childhood, but they are in danger both of 
Scylla and Charybdis. They may err by vanity and imagine 
that they were more excellent than they really were ; or they may 
err by modesty, and blame themselves for faults which were not 

XXII [ 5 ] 



THE BOY 

so personal as they were ci^ffmstantial. In rare cases we may 
get an introspective view of a boy's life, written while he was a 
boy, but I do not remember any masculine diary like that of 
Marie Bashkirtseff, the prodigy of egotism, the genius run wild, 
the morbid self-auscultator who could listen to the beatings of 
her own heart and register the sounds of her own respiration. 

It is almost a fashion in these days for men who have ac- 
quired distinction to write the memoirs of their boyhood. Two 
of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Professor Gildersleeve, the 
Grecian, and Professor Newcomb, the astronomer, published 
accounts of the "formative influences" to which they were 
subjected. I learn that my successor. President Remsen, has 
this year done something similar in his reminiscences for the 
history of the New York City College, his Alma Mater. Presi- 
dent Dwight and President A. D. White once wrote similar 
articles. Noteworthy Englishmen — Tyndall, Lecky, Farrar, 
and Frederic Harrison among the number — have written the 
story of their youth. Ruskin, poet, artist, naturahst, philoso- 
pher, revealed under such cryptogamic titles as the Springs of 
Wandel, Heme Hill, Almond Blossoms, and the Banks of Tay, 
the Hfe of a boy as it appears to a septuagenarian. Franklin 
wrote his autobiography, so did Gibbon, so did Rousseau ; and 
so we can go farther and farther back in history till we reach the 
Confessions of Saint Augustine. It is interesting to notice that 
among the writers of our own day many fall back on the term of 
the day, heredity, which seems to serve equally well as a scape- 
goat and as a mentor. 

The sum of all that I have been able to discover from these 
and many other writings, and from innumerable opportunities 
to study boys, may be very briefly stated. 

Every boy differs from every other boy in character as he 
does in appearance. Even twins, while they closely resemble 
one another in many respects, may differ essentially in funda- 
mental tastes and talents. Mr. Galton says that extreme simi- 
larity and extreme dissimilarity are nearly as common between 
twins of the same sex as moderate resemblance. If this is con- 
firmed, what becomes of heredity ? 

The corollary is obvious, that plans of education should as 
XXII [ 6 ] 



THE BOY 

far as possible be adapted to individual requirements; but as 
every boy is preparing for life among his fellows, and as Prov- 
idence has so ordered it that he is strongly influenced by other 
boys, it follows that to treat him alone, away from comrades, in 
the backwoods, in a cell, under exclusive instruction, is only 
justifiable under extraordinary circumstances. He comes into 
the world not only as an individual, with his own responsibihties 
and possibihties, but as one of a family, a neighborhood, a race, 
from which he cannot be extricated except by death. Isolation 
is therefore as unnatural as it is undesirable and difficult. 

Every boy is influenced both by his inheritance and his en- 
vironment. Yet the laws of heredity in the human species are 
not well enough known to give us any certain indications of 
what the child of any parents will become, while the conditions 
in which a person lives are as complex as the elements that 
nourish his body, the air he breathes, the water he drinks; as 
subtle and insinuating as the tones of the voice, the glance of the 
eye, the nod of the head, the pressure of the hand; as influential 
as religious faith, the forms of civil government, the habits of 
society, the lessons of antiquity, the examples of good men; and 
as trifling as a careless word, a thoughtless joke, a timely liint, a 
friendly warning or a loving smile. 

Until he reaches maturity every boy requires positive guid- 
ance from those who have had a longer experience in the ways of 
the world. It is always cruel, and it may be criminal, to allow a 
youth to experiment for himself upon conduct — to say that he 
must sow his own wild oats, that experience is the best teacher, 
that he must choose his own course. Every boy is entitled to 
know what older persons have discovered of the laws of conduct, 
and to receive restraint, caution, and warning until his eyes have 
been opened and his powers of judgment developed. Nobody 
questions that he ought to be taught the laws of health, of diet, of 
poisons, of cliniate, or the laws that protect his person and 
property; and it is surprising that anybody should question his 
right to initiation, by stringent discipline, into the laws of intel- 
lectual and moral well-being. Every boy, whether he wishes it 
or not, should be trained. Yet the contrary doctrine is covertly 
held, if not openly avowed, by many a tender mother and by 

xxn [ 7 ] 



THE BOY 

many a generous father, ^^ote the autobiography of John 
Stuart Mill. 

Neither precocity nor dulness is any certain index of the 
future of a boy. Only a wise man can tell the difference be- 
tween the priggishness of conceit and the display of unusual 
talent, and it takes a superlatively wise man to devise right 
methods for exciting temperaments that are dull, or, on the other 
hand, to guide a genius. Abnormal brilliancy and abnormal 
slowness are usually the result of abnormal physical conditions, 
and physiologists are only just beginning to show to ordinary 
parents how these unusual conditions may be discovered and 
treated. When we see a man we cannot tell what sort of a boy 
he came from, and when we see a boy we cannot tell what sort of 
man he will make. The great Emperor Charles V, who grew 
old prematurely, was slow in his development, and was nearly 
twenty-one before his beard grew. The facts lately collected 
by Doctor Scripture in regard to mathematicians show how im- 
possible it is to prophesy in respect to the development of hypo- 
thetical genius. Some who have risen to great distinction, like 
Gauss, Ampere, Safford, were precocious mathematicians in 
their youth ; another boy of extraordinary parts, Thomas Fuller, 
the Virginia calculator, remained an idiot. Daniel Webster, 
greatest of New England orators, broke down, we are told, in his 
early speaking. Most boys that run away from home take the 
road to ruin; but the liberator of Greece, Sir Richard Church, 
who died a few years ago in Athens, honored by a public funeral 
and by a monument raised by the Greek nation to commemorate 
his services, was a boy of under size, of Quaker parentage, who, 
before he was sixteen years of age, ran away from home and 
"took the king's shilling." 

The influence of modern psycho-physiological inquiries upon 
the coming generations is still undetermined. The good that is 
aimed at may perhaps surpass the evil that is done. Certainly, 
in these days, when morbid self-consciousness, extreme sensi- 
tiveness, bashfulness, shyness, and timidity are so frequently 
apparent, the wise parent, the wise teacher will hesitate before 
encouraging in his own family or his own school too intense and 
too prolonged introspection. Give the boys plenty of open air, 
xxn [ 8 ] 



THE BOY 

and when they cannot have this, encourage within doors exer- 
cise in hand-craft, the use of tools, and knowledge of the book of 
sports — not to the exclusion of other studies, but as collateral 
security that the mind and the body shall be simultaneously 
developed. As an example, the stories that we have of Daniel 
Webster's boyhood are very instructive. You may find them in 
Morse's life of the great orator of New England. The infant 
was a rather sickly little being at its birth, and some cheerful 
neighbors predicted that it would not live long. For many years 
the boy was weak and dehcate. Manual labor, the common lot 
of farmer's sons, was out of the question in his case. But now 
hear the other side of the story. "Young Webster was allowed 
to devote much of his time to play, to play of the best sort, in the 
woods and fields." The bar and the senate and the cabinet tell 
the conclusion of a career which began with such meagre hopes. 

Healthy, out-of-door lives, directed toward objects of en- 
joyment, of observation, of sport, of acquisition, are better for 
boys than exclusive devotion to books, and especially than 
habits of introspection, self-examination, casuistry, journal- 
writing. 

Of all the facts that the world has accumulated with respect 
to the art of training, but little has been reduced to intelligible 
terms respecting the methods of producing this or that variety 
of character. Certain general principles have indeed been es- 
tabhshed, like the vague laws of health: "eat nothing improper, 
drink nothing improper, do nothing improper, and you will be 
well"; but how shall we counteract the insidious microbe that 
may ruin all our expectations of health and thwart our incessant 
carefulness? "Go to school, learn your lessons, win your 
diplomas," are directions as good as they are simple; but how 
shall the bacteria be got rid of that appear in the forms of bad 
company, laziness, lack of interest in certain branches of study, 
inabihty to master the calculus or the Greek subjunctive, deceit- 
ful faciHty, corrosive vanity, excessive versatihty, unusual ob- 
stinacy, or that incapacity to accept discipline which is the exact 
reverse of what George EHot calls " genius " ? Why is it that no 
school of painting can promise to make a great painter of any 
candidate, however promising; that no college can assure a 
XXII [ 9 ] 



THE BOY 

parent that his son shall hQ0tnc a scholar; that no lessons in 
English composition will make an orator ot a poet; that pro- 
longed studies in history and poHtics do not produce statesmen ? 
Is it not still more remarkable that the incessant care of the best 
and wisest parents and teachers is so often counteracted by the 
examples and the temptations of boyhood and manhood ? 

Schools are not restricted to boyhood. They are the ar- 
rangements of nature and Providence and society, by which, at 
every stage of our existence, we are prepared for something 
beyond. The cradle is a school, and so is the nursery. The 
kindergarten and the infant class are of a little higher grade. 
Grammar schools and colleges come next. Then come the high 
schools that v/e call universities, with their departments of law, 
medicine, theology, and the liberal arts. All along the course arc 
supplementary schools, spreading out their tentacles for the 
capture of those who are not bound elsewhere. Sooner or later 
for us all begins the pedagogy of life — the school of practice, 
where the lessons of the books are applied to the affairs of men. 
So Milton sings : 

"All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great Task-master's eye.'' 

Likewise George Herbert : 

"Lord, with what care thou hast begirt us roundl 
Parents first season us, then schoolmasters 
Deliver us to laws ; they send us bound 
To rules of reason, holy messengers. '- 

From the cry of the infant to the last breath of the centenarian, 
life is one long school, without holidays or vacations. Each day 
Jaas its lessons, each decade its reviews. 

We often read in the newspapers that some prominent person 
was a self-made man. Francis Lieber used to ridicule this 
phrase by saying that he should like to stand by while a man was 
making himself. But the absurdity of such a phrase has never 
been more clearly stated than by Mr. Charles A. Dana, in his 
recent eulogy of Horace Greeley. Mr. Greeley is an examule 
almost as striking as Benjamin FrankHn or Abraham Lincoln, 
of what a man may become without scholastic discipline. The 

XXII [ lO ] 



THE BOY 

three were men of exceptional talent, exceptional vigor, and ex- 
ceptional power of will. Mr. Dana says of Greeley : "He was a 
man of almost no education; indeed, of no education at all ex- 
cept what he had acquired for himself," and then he adds these 
sage words: "The worst school that a man can be sent to (and 
the worst of all it is for a man of genius) is what is called a self- 
education. There is no greater misfortune for a man of extraor- 
dinary talent than to be educated by himself, because he has of 
necessity a very poor schoolmaster. There is nothing more 
advantageous to an able youth than to be thrown into contact 
with other youths in the conflict of study and in the struggle for 
superiority in the school and in the college. That was denied to 
Mr. Greeley. He knew no language but his own; but of that he 
possessed the most extraordinary mastery." 

And now I have a few words to add in respect to what is 
commonly called " the preparatory school," the place where boys 
are prepared for college. Not all its pupils will go to college, 
it is true, but all have chosen, or have been chosen, to follow a 
course of training which, by the common consent of educated 
men, leads up to a college course. "He was fitted for college" 
is a phrase that marks an epoch in education quite as distinctly 
as the phrase a "Bachelor of Arts." It means that a youth of 
fair parts, during his teens, has been taught the elements of 
mathematical science, and two or three languages in addition to 
his mother tongue ; that he has been introduced to a knowledge 
of the natural world, and that he has some acquaintance with 
his own country and his own stock. It should also mean that he 
has learned the difficult art of study, and has acquired good 
habits of attention, memory, and simple accurate expression. 
In addition, the phrase is beginning to imply that the boy has 
begun the study of some branch of science, and has at least 
learned how to observe the phenomena of the animate life and of 
the inanimate forces by which he is surrounded. Side by side 
with these intellectual lessons moral discipline is also given. 

Certainly one of the first requisites of a good preparatory 

school is bodily discipline. This is partly to be secured by 

watchfulness in respect to posture, diet, repose, gymnastics, 

within the school walls; it is to be still further promoted by 

XXII [ii] 



THE BOY 

abundant exercise in the op^ air. Manly sports with the bat 
and the oar, running, jumping, bowling, swimming, rowing, 
riding, fencing, boxing, and, if possible, sailing, are all to be 
encouraged. Nor is mihtary training to be underrated. The 
systematic exercise of every limb and every muscle is desirable, 
not under rules too rigidly laid down by the higher authorities, 
but under regulations spontaneously developed by the youth. 
It is generally conceded that just now, in England and this 
country, there is danger of intemperance in sport. This may be 
less disastrous than intemperance in drink or meat; neverthe- 
less there is such a thing as inebriety in athletic ganics. I do not 
refer to the danger of broken limbs and bruised faces, for they 
are rarely enduring injuries, but to the danger of unfair rivalries, 
of bad associations, of peculiar t:mptations in the anticipation 
and enjoyment of victory or in th^ depression of defeat, in the 
neglect of other and higher scholastic duties, in the waste of time 
and money on costly journeys, perhaps in extravagant hospi- 
tality. The boys themselves must be encouraged to correct 
these tendencies, but they have a right to expect that we older 
boys will remind th. m of their highest obligations and encourage 
their fulfilment. '%\ih the reasonable control which players, 
teachers, parents, can readily exercise, and which the young 
ladies and the newspapers might greatly encourage, the just 
medium can be secured, and athletics continue to be an essential 
factor in the training of American boys. 

The importance of mental habits is sometimes forgotten in 
the eagerness to impart knowledge. Perhaps the colleges arc 
more to blame for this than the schools; for the colleges receive 
their pupils on examination, and examinations are contrived so 
as to show sometimes what the freshman knows or sometimes 
what he does not know. Usually the examiners have not time, 
if they have the disposition, and if they have time and disposition 
they may not have the capacity, to put the candidate to any other 
test than his ability to answer certain questions. 

Examinations are a great stumbling-block not only to the 
pupil, but also to the examiner, and I shall not now discuss this 
vexatious theme. However, this much may be said. That 
teacher fails who keeps the coming examination perpetually in 

XXII [ 12 ] 



THE BOY 

sight. It is his business to think of the minds of his pupils, 
individually, to strengthen, prune, stimulate, train, the various 
qualities exhibited by each scholar. He should indeed impart 
knowledge, not forgetful that it is as true in the examination 
room as anywhere else, "if there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
away " ; but he should also enforce the formation of habits — and 
especially at the schoolboy age — of close attention, tenacious 
memory, and accurate statement. These three mental virtues 
are not unworthy to be named after faith, hope, and charity, the 
trinal virtues of St. Paul — attention, memory, truth, and the 
greatest of these is truth. 

The intellectual lessons that Lo' s receive should be so im- 
parted that they may promote the formation of moral habits. 
Accuracy, carefulness, truthfulness of statement, fidelity, 
thoroughness, courtesy, self-control, deference, consideration, 
respect, temperance, these are virtues that may readily be de- 
veloped while the boy is crossing the pons asinorum or stumbhng 
over a sentence of Tacitus. 

"Refrain to-night," said Hamlet to the queen, "and that 
shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence; the next 
more easy; for use almost can change the stamp of nature and 
master the devil or throw him out with wondrous potency." 

The idea of the preparatory school has probably been more 
completely developed in England than in this country, and the 
names of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Westminster, and Winchester 
are almost as famous as those of Oxford and Cambridge. 
Rugby is especially familiar to us, partly because of the remark- 
able character of Thomas Arnold, admirably portrayed by Dean 
Stanley, and partly because of the adventures of Tom Brown — 
known to every schoolboy and almost as real as the doctor him- 
self. Worthy to be named with the story and the memoir are 
the verses of Matthew Arnold on Rugby chapel. "Through 
thee," the poet says of his father, 

"I believe 
In the noble and great who are gone; 
Pure souls, honored and blest 
By former ages 
Yes, I believe that there lived 

XXII [ 13 ] 



THE BOY 

Others like th^Ri the past ; 
Not Hke the men of the crowd 

But souls tempered with fire, 
Fervent, heroic, and good — 
Helpers and friends of mankind. '- 

We know less about Mr. Edward Thring, the head-master of 
Uppington school, who died some years ago, but it is clear that 
he too was born to be a leader and teacher of boys. I have been 
acquainted in this country, intimately, with a kindred soul, an 
EngHsh schoolmaster, who, first in Trinity school of New York, 
then at Lake Mohegan, then in a college, and at length in a 
university, exercised over all the youth that knew him the 
strongest intellectual and moral influence. Long as they Hve his 
pupils will revere Charles d'Urban Morris. Such men are 
robust. Their virility is shown in bodily exercises, in scholar- 
ship, in poHtics, in rehgion. They quit themselves Hke men and 
are strong. Happy the land where they are engaged in the ser- 
vice of the boys! 

Characters Uke those just mentioned have been developed in 
this country. I could name some who are living, beloved, 
honored, obeyed, and followed. Among the departed. Doctor 
Abbot of Exeter and Doctor Taylor of Andover are particularly 
worthy to be remembered. But on the whole, the tendency of 
our times is not toward the fostering of such teachers. Many of 
the brightest Americans are attracted by business. The three 
professions traditionally called learned, and the modern scientific 
pursuits, enlist great numbers. Of those who devote themselves 
to teaching, the most prefer to enter the service of the college or 
the university. Few only, so far as my acquaintance goes, seek 
permanent careers in the service of boys' schools; few declare 
that they will be satisfied with the opportunities and emoluments 
of a good and faithful teacher. Hence, one of the most delight- 
ful of intellectual pursuits, one of the most useful, one of the 
most honorable, one of the most sacred, is in danger of falling 
into the hands of inferior men. The only remedy that I can see 
is for the head-masters, trustees, and parents to be on the watch, 
and when a born teacher appears, engage him, reward him, 

xxn [ 14] 



THE BOY 

encourage liim, retain him. See that his path is free from 
stones, that he is not overworked or harassed, and that he is kept 
contented in his lot. Let him be sure that as much respect and 
as much income will be his as would fall to his fortune were he 
to enter the pulpit or be called to the bar. Let it never be for- 
gotten that the teacher's gifts are as rare as the poet's. The 
methods of education can make scholars, pedants, specialists, 
and a very narrow man may live in his den and benefit the world 
by patient observation and mJnute researches. But no process 
has been discovered for making teachers. They are like gems, 
that must be found, for they cannot be produced. I would 
rather place a schoolboy under one "all-round man," whose 
manners, morals, and intellectual ways were exemplary and who 
was capable of teaching him Homer and Euclid, than under a 
group of specialists selected simply as mathematicians, physi- 
cists, and linguists. Later on, v/hen the character of a boy is 
established, when his habits are formed, when he knows how to 
study, when he has learned the art of acquiring knowledge and 
the graces of expression, let the specialists take hold of him. 
Even then let it be provided that the specialists shall not be too 
narrow. If possible, choose scientific men from the school of 
Agassiz, Henry, Bache, and Dana; and linguists from the school 
of Woolsey, Felton, Whitney, Drisler, and Gildersleeve — men 
who know multa et multum. 

As to the curriculum of a preparatory school, this is not the 
place to measure its limits or its requisites, as they are virtually 
determined by the college authorities, not by the schoolmasters. 
If the colleges say that they will not admit as scholars those who 
fail to show a knowledge of certain prescribed studies, the pre- 
paratory school must teach those studies or must close its doors; 
there is no middle course. Boys are fitted for college in a pre- 
paratory school, or they are not — that is the only question. 
Nevertheless, I believe that the day is coming when there will be 
a revision of our educational creed, when the colleges will not 
make their entrance examinations such rigid tests of memory as 
they are now, but will contrive to make them tests of power. Is 
a boy capable of carrying forward the studies of the college ? — 
that must be found out. His capacity to retain and repeat what 

XXII [15] 



THE BOY 

he has learned is one sign of his qualifications, but there are 
many others which a nicer analysis may employ. The qualita- 
tive test is quite as important as the quantitative. Not the size 
of the brain, but its structure, determines its worth. The pos- 
session of ten thousand facts may distinguish an idiot, but an 
idiot gives no proper emphasis; he does not perceive the differ- 
ence between the trifling and the fundamental. Yet an ex- 
traordinary memory may also distinguish a scholar. Lord Ma- 
caulay, for example, was heard to say that if by some miracle of 
vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress 
were destroyed he would undertake to reproduce them both from 
recollection. A scholar holds his knowledge in well-arranged 
groups, under certain principles, under certain laws; he is con- 
stantly exercising his judgment, his discrimination, his reason. 
He knows where to lay the stress; he does not confound the 
essential with its accidents. 

Whenever the time comes for a revision of the curriculum of 
the preparatory school, three subjects should receive much more 
attention than is now given to them. The study of science 
should be so pursued that the habit of close observation and of 
reasoning upon ascertained facts should at least be initiated. 
Nature should be approached by the schoolboy as a willing and 
ever-present teacher. Her lessons should be the delight of 
every adolescent. When we remember that in contemplating 
the heavens, in watching the life of plants and animals, in the 
observation of the modes of motion and in studying the inorganic 
world there are innumerable and infinitely varied opportunities 
to awaken curiosity, to train the eye and the hand, to exercise 
the judgment, to reward investigation — how strange that so 
little progress is made in the introduction of scientific studies 
in elementary education! Modern languages also, especially 
French and German, are nowadays indispensable in a liberal 
education; and they are much more readily acquired in child- 
hood than in maturity. How are they to get just recognition 
in the preparatory schools? An acquaintance with the Bible 
should also be required of every schoolboy. College professors 
have lately been showing how ignorant the youth of America are 
of the history, the geography, the biography, and the literature of 

XXII [ i6 ] 



THE BOY 

the sacred books. I do not now refer to its religious lessons, but 
I speak of the Bible as a basis of our social fabric, as the em- 
bodiment of the most instructive human experiences, as a col- 
lection of poems, histories, precepts, laws, and examples, price- 
less in importance to the human race. These Scriptures have 
pervaded our literature. All this inheritance we possess in a 
version which is unique. Its marvellous diction, secured by the 
revisions of many centuries, and its substantial accuracy, the 
care of many generations of scholars, are beyond our praise. 
But how little study does the schoolboy give to this book in 
secular or sacred hours; how ignorant may he really be of that 
which is supposed to be his daily counsellor! Science, modern 
languages, and the Bible have been so long neglected in pre- 
paratoiy schools that it is extremely hard nowadays to find effec- 
tive teachers for these subjects. There is no consensus as to 
books, no tradition respecting methods. Perhaps we are wait- 
ing for the waters to be disturbed by the angel of deliverance, but 
we shall wait in vain unless we put forth efforts of our own to 
reach the true remedies. The day will come for better things; 
we can see its approaches. 

Meanwhile, it is just as well to remember that there is 
nothing sacred in our present curriculum. It is a method which 
generally produces good resuhs, but it is no cathoUcon. Its 
defects are perceived by this generation, and the next will pro- 
vide the remedies. Thus slowly move the wheels. 



xxn [17] 



* 



I 




XXIII 



HOW TO THINK 

BY 

EDWARD EVERETT HALE 

CHAPLAIN OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE 



/^NE oj the most difficult moments that a youth faces in 
^^ lije is that in which, having graduated from some ele- 
mentary school, he suddenly finds himself no longer under con- 
trol. Instead of having certain well-regulated bits of information 
poured into him, he is free to acquire what he will, or to reject 
it all. Thinking is no longer done for him by learned teachers, 
he must think for himself. And by the quality of that thinking 
all his future life must stand or fall. It is at that perilous moment 
that a word of guidance may prove of infinite value. It is then 
that he should be familiar with the following address. 

The Reverend Edward Everett Hale, D.D., LL.D., is not 
only one of the most widely known of American literary masters, 
but has also for many years held official rank as the Chaplain of 
the United States Senate. He may thus more than any other 
man be regarded as the official speaker for the religious faith 
of our country. The words of counsel which he offers, not only 
to youth but to older minds as well, are here combined with a valu- 
able scientific analysis of the processes of thought.* 

In a playful little poem by William Barnard, who was 
Dean of Dcrry a hundred and nine years ago, in answer to a 
challenge from Dr, Johnson, who had bidden him improve 
himself after he was forty-eight years old, he selects his 
teachers. Three of them are Sir William Jones, Adam Smith, 
Edmund Burke, and the fourth, Beauclerk. The lines are: 
"Jones, teach me modesty and Greek; 
Smith, how to think, Burke, how to speak; 
And Beauclerk, to converse. !- 
XXIU [ I ] 



HOW TO THINK 

The man who should h^^Adam Smith as a teacher in the 
art of thinking would be fortunate, if the teacher could really 
bring his pupil near to his own level. And in the midst of the 
modern philosophizing, I will say to any quiet, intelligent 
person, who docs not dislike common sense, that he will find 
the books of Jones to be good reading to-day. 

Capel Lofft says, in his curious book on "Self-Formation," 
that the elder DTsraeli says that no person has ever written 
on the "Art of Meditation." 

I have not been able to find the statement by DTsraeli; 
but Capel Lofft says that he has spent much time in verifying 
it, and he believes it to be true.^ 

He goes further and says that not one man in twenty ever 
does think ; by which he means that very few men think to any 
purpose or with any system. I am afraid that this statement 
is true. Most of the people one meets in the world take their 
opinions ready-made from the newspapers or their neighbors 
or, in general, from the fashion. 

There is indeed a habit, for which two causes could be found, 

'Capel Lofft 'shook which I have cited above is called "Self-For- 
mation, by a Fellow of a College." It has been reprinted in America, 
and will be found in the large libraries. It is a gossiping, entertain- 
ing book, professing to describe the "history of an individual mind," 
and has a good many practical hints, useful to young students. He 
is always talking of his great discovery, which to most people seems 
almost a mare's nest. Two pages, one in the first volume, one in 
the second, contain the whole of it. It amounts to this, — that in 
reading you should stop at the end of each sentence and "re-flect," 
turn back on the sentence, to be sure that you possess its meaning. 
What follows will be, he says, that you must go through it at one 
breath, or if it be an unusually long one, that you give one breath to 
every member of it. On this business of our breathing, in time, he 
lays great stress, as a good teacher of swimming would bid you breathe 
in proper time with your strokes. When, in the second volume, we 
come to the great secret of the book, it proves that we cannot think 
unless we think in time wnth our breathing. "I have already stated 
my conviction that the management of the breath is very important 
in conversation, in studious reading, and in oratory. I am just as 
thoroughly persuaded that this is true of meditation, that it governs 
in great degree the thinking faculty. . . ." "I despatched every 
sentence," as he thought it, "in a breath, and then, doubling the 
XXIII [ 2 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

of taking it for granted that men cannot control their thoughts. 
It is said squarely that the thoughts come or go wholly without 
the choice or pow^r of the man. But this is not the theory 
of the great men, of the real leaders. They bid us control 
our thoughts, that is, to learn to think, just as we control any 
other appetites. Paul tells us what we are to think of,* and 
he goes on to the other matter, which is more dangerous, and 
tells us what we are not to think of. There are things which 
are not even to be spoken of, and with an allowable paradox, 
Paul tells what they are. It is only writers of a lower grade 
who seem to take for granted that you must let thoughts go 
or come at their reckless pleasure or by the mere chance of 
what may be the condition of the circulation of blood upon 
the brain. Such writers, if they were pressed, would have 
to say that you are not to undertake any control of bodily 
appetites, any more than you undertake the control of mental 
processes. 

But the truth is that Man is master of mind, and master 
of body, if he will. This is the privilege of a child of God, and 
a true man asserts his empire and uses it. I do not say he 
can begin all of a sudden in such control, if he had never used 
it before. But he can learn how to gain such control. He 
can have more to-day than he had last Tuesday, and he can 

blow, — a second idea having flowed into the interval of vacuity, — I 
applied myself to it in the same way, and so proceeded through the 
series." 

It is evident that |Lofft had never read Swedenborg. If he had, 
he would have cited the Arcana Celestia. "The reason," says Swe- 
denborg, "why life is described in Genesis ii. 7, by breathing and 
breath is because the men of the most ancient church perceived states, 
of law and of faith by states of respiration. . . . Concerning this 
respiration nothing can yet be said, inasmuch as it is a subject at 
this day altogether unknown; nevertheless, the most ancient people 
(those before the flood) had a perfect knowledge of it"; and Swe- 
denborg refers to the same subject in page i, 119, in the tenth book, 
of the Arcana. I think that Swedenborg was here referring, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, to Abraham Tucker (Ned Search) 
where he describes the method of intercommunication of souls in 
their "spiritual bodies." 

*Ephesians v. 3-12. 

XXIII [ 3 ] ^^u.^^. 



HOW TO THINK 



have more next Tuesday Wan he has to-day. This is what is 
meant by learning to think. Thus a man may train his memory 
to do better work for him this year than it did last year. True, 
when the body begins to fail, the memory may begin to fail 
in its mechanical processes, but .none the less shall that man 
find that the eternal realities of past life are his. Thus it will 
happen that a man tells you that he cannot remember, when 
he has never taught himself to perceive, or to observe. 

Mr. Ruskin goes so far as to say that all which we call 
genius for fine art is simply an admirable memory. He 
constantly recurs to this. Claude Lorraine and Turner paint 
the sky well; for they well remember what they have seen. It 
seems certain that the faculties even of the observation of 
color may be improved by exercise. Any foreman in a dry- 
goods shop will tell us how fast the boys improve in their study 
of color; and it is well known to oculists that women, because 
they have been trained for generations in matching colors, 
have become more precise in this business than men are. It 
occurs to me, as I write, that one of the most brilliant and suc- 
cessful colorists I know among American artists began life in 
a dry-goods shop. What drudgery he thought it then! And 
has he perhaps lived to think that drudgery a blessing ? ^ 

We begin then, as we always begin, by demanding deter- 
mination ; the will must act, and act imperiously. "I will 
think on this subject." This implies what the writers call 
concentration; just as we found that in putting himself to sleep 
a man must make sleep his whole business, — first, second, 
and last, he must devote himself to sleep, — so now he must 
devote himself to thinking on this one subject and on no other. 
There is a great advantage in the training of our public schools. 
Boys and girls learn to study without attending to the work 
of the school-room; or if they do not they throw away a great 
opportunity. You ought to be able early in life so to concentrate 
thought that in a railway carriage you can close your eyes, 
take up a subject of thought, and hold to it for a reasonable 
time, perhaps till you have done with it. At all events you ought 
to be able to lay by the subject for future reference, ticketed, 

1 The reference is to Mr. Bradford, the painter of Arctic pictxires- 
XXIII [ 4 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

so that you may know how far you have advanced with it and 
where you arc to begin another time. 

You determine, for instance, to think about a protective 
tariff. How much do I know of it and where am I ignorant? 
What are the foundations of my knowledge ? How sure are they, 
and where can I improve on them? Now what follows clearly 
and surely on the premises? What is more doubtful, and 
how can I solve such doubt ? 

I do not believe that it is well to hold on long at a time 
upon the same topic. I think it is better to take a subject to 
a certain point, then to ticket it, as I say, and lay it by pre- 
pared to take it up again. But when you take it up again 
do not begin at the old beginning and go over the old ground. 
Take what you have done for granted, and from the point 
where you are go forward. 

In this matter, as in all other matters where will is involved, 
there comes in the necessity of energy. Capel Lofft, if you will 
look up his book, has a great deal to say about this, and goes 
back to the derivations of the Greek words. But it ought to 
be enough to say that you cannot think well unless you think 
with all your might. You cannot think lazily. You cannot 
think if you are half-hearted about it. You must somehow 
take interest enough in your work to follow it at the moment 
as if it were the only thing. Unless you work with your whole 
heart, the work cannot be wholly done. 

Without going further into detail, I must say something 
as to the necessity of the business in hand, and I will take 
the three departments of mental activity which we call memory, 
imagination, and argument, or reasoning. Although as old age 
comes on the mechanical processes of memory may give way, 
a man who has trained his memory will feel himself sure all the 
same of the external realities of his life, though he may not be 
able to recall the letters of their names. So a man may train 
and enlarge his powers of imagination. Nay, he must, if he 
is to make any considerable advance in the larger life. Full 
one half of men's failures are due to their lack of imagination, 
or to their neglect to use imagination at the right time and 
in the right way. Once more, every man who is rightly and 
XXIII [ 5 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

wisely to do his duty in the world among his fellows must train 
his power of argument. H^iiust not stand by, helpless, when 
some wordy fool on a platform makes the worse appear the bet- 
ter reason. Memory, imagination, reasoning, then, arc for us 
three good examples of the great necessity in which we must 
exercise our power. Of these three duties I will speak a little 
more in detail, not dwelling on what a man may do in training 
his perceptions, his power of concentration, his power of state- 
ment or of conversation, and a hundred other faculties which 
come under the general statement that the man is to be master 
of the mind. 

First, then, as to mcmor}\* Had one no other reason 
for training memory caicfully, and keeping it in hand, here is 
the supreme reason: that one must keep ready at every in- 
stant of trial the determinations made in the moments of re- 
flection. As I am always saying, Wordsworth defines the 
hero as he 

"Who in the heat of conflict keeps the Law 
In calmness made, — and sees what he foresaw." 

The little child untrained comes to his mother in grief 
because he has done wrong, and makes, probably, the true 
excuse, as he sobs out that he did not remember. The trained 
man, trampling temptation under foot, does remember. He 
remembers his resolution, and this re-enforces will. There 
is an interesting thought in the mere etymology of our word 
"conscience." "Conscience" is a Latin word, which means 
the knowledge all at once of all the elements involved. If my 
conscience is quick and strong, I know at once, and that once 
is now, all that I can know of this temptation. I know to what 
ruin it brings me ; I know by what methods I can quench its 
fire; I know how to put my foot upon its head and the point of 
my sword at its throat. I know all this now. 

^ I have not dared go into the systems of what is called artificial 
memory. The best by far, I think, is in Gouraud's book, published 
with a good deal of fuss and feathers in New York over forty years 
ago. Gouraud remembered everything so perfectly that we used 
to call him "the Wandering Jew." 

All these systems depend on using the stronger side of memory, 
whatever it is, to re-enforce the weaker. 
XXIII [ 6 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

"Conscire" is the Latin verb; to know at once the per- 
ceptions of the outward senses, the lessons of old experience, 
and the present verdict of the man within. 

Charlotte Bronte refers to this necessity in that central 
passage, where she describes her heroine's conquest of im- 
mediate temptation. 

"Laws and principles are not for the times when there is 
no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body 
and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. Stringent are 
they, inviolate they shall be. If, at my individual convenience 
I might break them, what would be their worth ? They have 
a worth — so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe 
it now, it is because I am insane — quite insane; with my 
veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count 
its throbs. Conscience and reason are turned traitors against 
me, and are charging me with crime. They speak as loud 
as feeling in its clamors. Preconceived opinions, foregone 
determinations are all I have at this hour to stand by." 

But we need not go to poetry or fiction for our examples. 
The little child of whom I spoke comes to his mother, crying, 
and can only offer the apology that "he did not remember" 
that she had bidden him keep away from the stove. If his 
hand be not very badly burnt, she will not be very sorry; be- 
cause she now knows that he will remember better another 
time. Indeed, what Mr. Ruskin says of fine art, we may say 
of life. That all the training by which God is gradually chang- 
ing us from babies into archangels is but so much accumula- 
tion by memory, more or less completely educated. 

But this training of memory and this knowledge at one and 
the same time of the cause and consequence of the present 
temptation involve the right use of the imagination. The lar- 
ger life, indeed, which is the purpose and object for which 
we live every day, requires me to command and control my 
imagination, to use it on the right errands, and to refuse it when 
it would fain travel the wrong way. The world in which I live 
may be the cell of a wretched prison, cabined and confined 
as was the unfortunate dauphin, the son of Louis XVI., or as 
Kaspar Hauscr was said to be, so that his prison walls touched 
XXIII [ 7 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

him above, below, on the4||bt hand and on the left, behind 
and before. 

One is really almost as badly off as he is when he is in a 
crowded railway car after darkness has come on. I cannot 
talk to my next neighbor because he is a Moqui Indian, I can 
see nothing but the shadows from the smoking lamp, I can hear 
nothing but the clatter of the rail. This is hard circumstance. 
But what is circumstance to a trained child of God Hving 
by the divine order? I ought to be able to bid Shakespeare 
meet with Milton there. I may call Charles Dickens and Walter 
Scott into the interview. I may select the subject on which 
they shall talk, I may bid them say their say, and I may send 
them on their way. I may summon here all whom I have loved 
most in literature, be they people who have lived and breathed, 
or be they people who never had form or weight or visible 
body: such people as Jane Eyre or Di Vernon or Rosalind. 
I have them and they cannot leave me. The dead nausea 
of the disgusting car is forgotten, and in that prison cell I 
have enlarged my life to journey as I will. 

I recall that Mme. de Genlis, in her gossiping and enter- 
taining memoirs, goes at length into her habit of creating 
for herself an imaginary society. The passage is worth the 
search of enterprising readers, though I am afraid the book has 
neither index nor contents.^ 

Now for the same reason and for the larger life which all along 
we are seeking, you must train the faculty of reasoning, that 
you may have an opinion, and that opinion your own. To look 
on both sides and choose the better side, to dissect the rhetoric 
of a demagogue, to strip off his coat of many colors, and to show 
him for what he is, to decide between rival plans and to deter- 
mine one's aim, for one's own purposes, by one's own abilities, 
— all this is the duty of a man. Without this he forfeits a man's 
privilege. He is a chip on the current, whirled down in this 
flood, whirled up in that eddy, or left stagnant in some standing 
pool. How often, alas, one meets a man who never knew the 

^AU that is said on the cultivation of the imagination shows the 
importance of giving to children enough fairy-tales and enough 
poetry with which to amuse themselves. 

xxm [ 8 ] 



\HOW TO THINK 

luxury of an opinior. He has taken his morning impression 
from one newspaper, his evening impression from another. 
Meanwhile he has b^en the tool and the fool of every person who 
chose to use him, or to tell him what to think and what to say. 
To keep clear of that vacancy of life, a true man cares diligently, 
lovingly, for the weapons which have been given him, weapons 
of defence — yes, and sometimes weapons of attack, if need 
may be. He learns how to reason, how to search for truth, 
how to question nature, how to interpret her answers. He learns 
how to arrange in right order such eternal truths and such 
visible facts as relate to the matter he has in hand. He clears 
and enlarges his power of reasoning. 

The power of induction and deduction man has because 
he is a child of God. It is the faculty which distinguishes him 
from the brutes. A body of wolves in the Pyrenees may gather 
round the fire which a peasant has left, and will enjoy the warmth 
of the embers. A group of chattering monkeys on the rock 
of Gibraltar might gather so round the watchfire which an Eng- 
lish sentinel had left burning. They can enjoy the heat; but 
they cannot renew the fire. They cannot work out the deduction 
which is necessary before one kicks back upon the glaring 
embers the black brand which has rolled away. Were it to 
save their lives, they must freeze before one of them can deduce 
from what he sees the law or the truth as to what he must do. 
Here is it that man differs from the brute. He can learn. He 
can follow a deduction. He can argue. He can rise, step by 
step, to higher life. 

This he does when he takes the control of thought. He rises 
to a higher plane and lives in a larger life. * 

There is no neater or better illustration of the way in which 
a wise teacher draws out the thinking faculty of a child than 
that which Warren Colburn borrowed, from Miss Edgeworth, 

' All that is said on the culture of the thinking faculty is to be re- 
membered, seriously, by teachers who are in any danger of using 
text-books too much. The text-book, as an authority, injures the 
child's power to think. Make him work out the rule for himself, — 
if you can. That means, probably, if you know how to think your- 
self. 

XXIII [ 9 ] 



HOW TO THINK 

I believe, to place in the beginning of that matchless oral arith- 
metic which still holds its place in many well-regulated schools. 
The advantage which the thinking faculty gains from good 
training in mathematics cannot be overstated. A master 
in that business ^ used to say to me that, when you meet a man 
who says that he has no mathematical faculty, he is simply 
a man who was not well taught his "vulgar fractions" or his 
"rule of three" in childhood. I am inclined to think that 
this is true. A thousand writers have been eager to prove that 
good grammatical work does the same thing — and I believe 
that they are right. It is just the same mental process by which 
I build up a Latin verb, pronoun, and noun, so that they shall 
express the fact that " George Washington had taken off his own 
hat before he met Henry Knox," as the process by which I 
work out the truth that seventy-two apples costing nine cents 
a dozen may be exchanged for two pecks of walnuts costing 
three cents and three-eighths a quart. Why the parallel of the 
two studies of language and mathematics as mental gymnastics 
should have been so much belabored as it has been, I have 
never known. 

This is certain, that no one learns to think without thinking. 
I believe we may say more. I believe he must make a business 
of thinking. He must take hold of the control of his thought 
intentionally, resolutely, and energetically. If he does this I 
believe he will think more clearly, and with better results 
next year than he does to-day. 

'Nathan Hale, Jr. 



xxm [lo] 



XXIV 



THE GIRL 

"THE THING TO DO" 

BY 

WHITELAW REID 

UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO ENGLAND 



/tS girl and boy approach maturity their paths diverge. 
They can no longer be classed under a common name as 
" children^ ^ and dealt with under similar rules. As man and 
woman they become beings oj differing aims, differing thoughts, 
and differing capacities. Hence come two sets oj problems 
instead oj one, and the complexity oj modern lije is doubled, 
the difficulty oj grasping at its meaning and its outcome is im- 
measurably increased. To talk about the juture oj ^'the race^^ 
as a whole, as though men and women were a unit striving tow- 
ard a common goal, is to ignore an entire group oj antagonisms 
as obvious as lije itselj. 

The more direct problems involved in the question oj sex 
we have already treated; but now, looking along the line oj 
youthjul education, we reach the moment when it is finished — 
so jar as schools can finish education — and the girl, the young 
woman approaching maturity, looks out upon a wider lije. She 
asks herselj, demands oj her own intelligent and well-developed 
mind, the question, " What next ?" ^'Zo what course oj drijting 
or oj effort shall I seriously devote my set j until death ends the 
story?'' 

It is some sort oj answer to this momentous question that Mr. 
Reid here offers. As one who has long ranked among the com- 
manding journalists oj our land, as a leader in educational 
advancement, and as a statesman known to all Europe as well 
as to his home, Mr. Reid has certainly earned the right to speak 
and to be heard with earnest thought. The present address, 
XXIV [ I ] 



THE GIRL 

delivered before the Phi BSfF Kappa Society 0} Vassar College 
at the time 0} the young ladies^ graduation, is here published 
by his permission and with his approval. 

The brilliant President of a great California university 
has defined Wisdom as "Knowing What to do Next," and 
Virtue as "Doing it." Responding to the call with which 
the young ladies of the Phi Beta Kappa have honored me, 
I shall try to merit your attention by speaking to you for a little 
of "The Thing to Do." In proportion then to any success 
in saying the right word to you on this subject, that word must 
come, however unworthy the voice through which it speaks, as 
the counsel of Wisdom and the command of Virtue. 

The universal inquiry in the graduating class on Commence- 
ment Day is. What next ? The mere man has no monopoly of 
it. The girl graduate, too, is absorbed in questions about 
what shall she do. Misty visions float before her eyes. Now 
as always the vague outlines are apt to shape themselves to 
the first gaze, alike of the simplest and of the wisest, into happy 
homes and home responsibilities. But in these days of broader 
horizons, many another purpose in life comes in to enlarge 
or to confuse the picture. Whether with the home or without 
a home, comes the thought of a career worthy of the capacities 
here discovered, the training here given; perhaps a literary, 
or artistic, or scientific career, perhaps educational or profes- 
sional, perhaps reformatory, perhaps social; but always a 
career, always the desire for a field in which to exercise the 
proper power of the trained abilities and enjoy their rightful 
influence, always the resolve to do something. Let us first 
see now if there is not one especial thing which, in any career 
and whatever else may or may not be done, it is the duty of 
every girl graduate to attempt, in her respective sphere and 
to the full measure of her capacity. 

It was sixty -five years ago that a singularly acute French 

observer pronounced the legal profession the most conservative 

element in this country and the greatest safeguard against the 

excesses, as he called them, of democracy. But the interven- 

XXIV [ 2 ] 



i 



THE GIRL 

ing two-thirds of a century have shown many changes. We 
have seen no pohtical craze, from secession to the payment of 
national debts in fiat money or in silver, no popular delusion, 
from spirit portraits to communism or to the right of some 
laborers to prohibit free labor, that has not been led by lawyers; 
and we have seen no depth of degradation to which, in pursuit 
of a fee, some members of this profession have not descended, 
and that, too often, without incurring the active repudiation 
of the majority. 

Perhaps the dangerous tendencies in America of which De 
Tocqueville spoke are at the present time " the excesses of democ- 
racy"; though, perhaps again, they may be merely the general 
tendencies of the age, exhibited here a little earlier, or more 
freely, because of the liberty of faction democracy affords. At 
any rate, there has never been a day in the history of the coun- 
try when such a restraining influence as he attributed to the 
lawyers was so much needed as at present. Meanwhile the 
legal profession, through a not inconsiderable number of its 
members, has developed into one of the active means, not for 
restraining, but for actually furthering the excesses; and, as a 
whole, it certainly exerts now a less conservative and restrain- 
ing influence than was gratefully recognized in our earlier 
history. 

When John Stuart Mill taught, in a little book less talked 
about now than his later publicc tions, that women made con- 
tributions to the sum of human knowledge and consequent 
progress as important as those coming from men, though differ- 
ent in kind, being apt to be intuitional rather than logical, he 
may have furnished a hint as to the real safeguard against so- 
cial disorders that in his time were hardly known. If tlie 
conservative influence which is hereafter to protect us from the 
excesses either of democracy or of the spirit of the age is no 
longer to be surely and always found in the old quarter, it may 
still prove that we can turn for it to a class with higher in- 
spirations and keener moral perceptions, to a class with deeper 
interest in the outcome, and capable of unquestionably greater 
influence, whenever aroused to exercise it. It may prove, in 
fact, that we can look to the educated women of the country 
XXIV [ 3 ] 



THE GIRL 

rather than to its lawyers for the true conservatism in prin- 
ciple, in methods, and in constant application that is to save us 
from many of the most dangerous tendencies of the time. 
Hope, then, will not be lost for the future of our triumphant 
democracy till their characteristic excellences are corrupted or 
destroyed. 

The reasons for such an expectation lie in human nature 
itself, and in that female ability which Mr. Mill demonstrated 
for such contributions to human knowledge and progress. All 
the instincts of the educated woman are toward good order 
and good morals and good life; all her interests are against 
rash experiments and revolutionary changes ; the character alike 
of her judgment, her feelings, and her needs gives promise of 
sound and sane views of life and of human conduct. Both 
by inherent qualities and by acquired relations the rightly 
educated woman is a natural and necessary conservative. With 
her mental alertness and vivid perceptions she can never be a 
drag upon the machinery of human progress, but, thanks to 
her special aptitudes, she may always be its moderator and 
its governor. 

This at least is clear, that the twentieth-century woman has 
greater opportunities than were ever given to a human creature 
of her kind before, in the eighty centuries of the world's history 
of which we are supposed to have some records ; that she has 
been better prepared to improve them, and that she is more 
peremptorily called to the work — this twentieth-century woman, 
to whom have been given the keys of knowledge which are 
becoming almost the keys of life and death. The ferment and 
amazing discovery and development of the nineteenth century 
did not end when it closed ; they could be ,but the hot-bed 
for starting the prodigious, myriad -formed, almost infinite 
growths to be confidently expected in the twentieth. If, in the 
midst of these teeming and steaming activities, woman now 
possesses the real power which Mr. Mill attributed to her, then 
the imperative duty which her superior moral elevation, her 
nature, and her surroundings impose, for the whole term of her 
existence and throughout the whole course of our bewildering 
progress, is to furnish this conservative force in American life 
XXIV [ 4 ] 



THE GIRL 

which two-thirds of a century ago De Tocqueville thought 
already necessary. Her wisdom will point it out as a thing to 
do next, her virtue will shine in doing it. Thus the subject 
to which I have ventured to invite your attention, "The Thing 
to Do," arises before you, attends your incoming and your 
outgoing, and henceforth forever entreats and commands 
you. 

Of specific excesses toward which our democratic institu- 
tions seem to be tending perhaps we do not need to speak 
in any great detail. It may be enough to recognize that the 
American who colonized the Atlantic coast and the great Middle 
West, who framed the Constitution, started the Government, 
developed the country under it, and fought a gigantic Civil 
War to preserve it, is not the American who leads the popular 
movements of to-day. The type is changing; the beliefs are 
changing, and the aims. 

He is neither Puritan any longer, nor Cavalier. He may 
outwardly deny the decay of faith, but he inwardly feels it. 
Nothing is more noticeable at the great centres of population 
and of national activity, or in any large section of what calls 
itself, and is often called, our best society, than this disap- 
pearance of the old foundation of character and action; this 
loss of profound, enduring, restful faith in anything. It is a 
laissez-aller age; an age of loosening anchors and drifting 
with the tide; of taking things as they are, with cordial readi- 
ness to take them hereafter as they come; of an easy indiffer- 
ence, whose universal attitude toward each startling departure 
from old standards is "What does it matter, anyway?" — an 
age, in short, marked by a refined, "up-to-date" adaptation 
of the old Epicurean idea that there is nothing in this world 
to do but to eat and drink and make merry, for to-morrow we 
die. As Omar, prime favorite of the flower of this new school, 
has sung: 

What boots it to repeat 
How time is slipping underneath our feet; 
Unborn Tomorrow, and dead Yesterday, 
Why fret about them if To-day be sweet! 

XXIV [ 5 ] 



THE GIRL 

The loss of faith bringlWrs by a short cut straight to the loss 
of purpose in life — of any purpose at least beyond purely mate- 
rial ones. To those who need money, the duty of getting it 
first, and above anything else, becomes the gospel of life. To 
those who feel the need of position, whether in society, business, 
or elsewhere, their gospel drives them to all means within the 
law to attain them. To those who have both money and 
position comes the only remaining purpose in life, that of using 
them for an existence of amusement and enjoyment. Is it 
too much to say that never before in our history have such as- 
pirations so completely dominated and limited such large 
classes ? 

But this craze for mere amusement and enjoyment, like 
other perverted appetites, grows by what it feeds on. The 
amusement soon becomes wearisome, the enjoyment soon palls 
unless constantly more and more spectacular and bizarre. 
Perpetual change and constantly increasing variety of extremes 
seem to be the ever rising price of keeping amused. One never 
is for long where one wants to be, or doing what one desires; 
there must be incessantly a rushing to and fro, and a change 
of pursuit, all under the glare of electric lights and the blare 
of brass bands. If in the country, one must hasten to the city 
where something is going on; if in the city, one must fly to 
the country where the crowd is not so mixed, and where pleasan- 
ter house-parties can be gathered; if in one's own land, one 
longs for the boulevards or the Alps; if abroad, one is eager 
to try the new steamer back; if at the seashore, one wants 
suddenly to know what the mountains are like, and can only 
find amusement in going to see when clothed in leather jackets, 
protected by masks and goggles, and powdered with dirt, 
rushing through the dusty air on the highways at forty or 
fifty miles an hour in a Red Devil, and leaving the luckless 
rustics in the way to go to a fiend of any color they like. 

Even then this vehement vacuity is not amusing unless it is 

talked about. One must be forever before the footlights and, if 

possible, in the centre of the stage. Privacy is deadly dulness. 

Not to have your name every other day in the newspapers, 

XXIV [ 6 ] 



THE GIRL 

and especially in the most hopelessly vulgar and inane of the 
newspaper columns, the so-called social ones, is to be out of 
the world, to be bored to death. Not to see every intimate 
fact about yourself or your friends thrust naked and shame- 
less under the public eye is to feel that you are dropping out of 
the swim. If there is a steamer that has raced across the 
Atlantic in fifteen minutes less than any other, you suddenly 
realize that nothing is going on here, and you must immedi- 
ately cross back on that steamer. If there is a White Ghost 
that has flitted over crowded country roads half a mile an hour 
faster than the last Red Devil, and has caused more runaways 
and killed one or two more people, you will be leading a vciy 
dull life till you have gone faster in that same, or in some better 
and uglier machine, and have left a wider swath of disaster 
and terror behind you. Even then the amusement is stale 
unless the papers tell you that you broke the record, if not 
somebody's neck also, print your portrait, and mention who your 
grandfather was, by way of showing how proud the presumably 
worthy old man ought to be of his hopeful, goggle-eyed descen- 
dant. 

Gregariousness and glare are the irredeemably vulgar notes 
of it all. To seek enjoyment within yourself and your own 
circle, in resources of your own, and without a fresh flash-light 
picture every day, becomes unendurable. A country residence 
is impossible unless a dozen others, "of our own set, you know," 
are within five minutes' call ; and even then it is slow without a 
thronged race-track at hand. Thus Newport, rather than Bilt- 
more, becomes the veneered and shiny national type for those 
who can, at will, command either. As for the babes that must 
struggle through childhood into precocious maturity in such 
surroundings, why, they are to live in this world, aren't they — 
not In the happy Valley of Rasselas ? Why shouldn't they get 
on, without rest and real country life, as well as their parents ? 

If loss of faith and loss of purpose have led to such changes 
from the decorous, albeit a little provincial, society of a hun- 
dred years ago, what transformations may not be expected 
from the same influences in our political life ? Already we begin 
XXIV [ 7 ] 



THE GIRL 

to note the same fever for^pricty and unreasoning change. We 
know now how Aristides was banished because the citizens were 
tired of hearing him called the just; we have more than once 
given in modern phrases the same old Greek reason for our 
own banishments. "Oh, well! they've been in long enough; 
let's try a change." The steady persistence in policy of the 
fathers and founders of the Republic seems disappearing; and 
the political characteristics displayed are becoming noticeably 
less English, and even less Northern. "You are as fickle as the 
French, and as fond of sudden excitements," is a criticism of 
overcandid observers from the north of Europe, which we hear 
with increasing frequency;^ and it must be confessed that of 
late we do show, oftener than could be desired, sudden and 
irresponsible popular movements which we are apt to look for 
in the Latin rather than the Northern races. A wave of excite- 
ment sweeps over the country and throughout whole com- 
munities the very best and most conscientious of our people 
are stampeded with sudden fear of European domination, and 
alarm about the Pope of Rome, if we do not hurriedly erect 
legislative dams against foreign invasions on our eastern shores. 
The Know Nothings had a close race with the Free Soilers 
for first place, and for a time were ahead — seeming actually 
about to succeed in making hostility to the foreigner rather 
than sympathy with the slave the shibboleth of the new national 
party. Within my own experience, a distinguished official and 
highly honored citizen of New York has vehemently arraigned 
me for neglect of duty, in my own modest sphere, in not trying 
to arouse people against the peril to our liberties and the 
alarming violation of the Constitution of the United States 
involved in the creation of a foreign prince in this country — in 
the person of Cardinal Gibbons! But presently the wind is 
blowing from exactly the opposite quarter; sympathy for the 
sweet Emerald Isle in turn overpowers us; we raise money by 
the hundred thousand dollars, are hardly dissuaded from raising 
volunteers also for the Fenian army, and shout ourselves hoarse 
in pecuniary and rhetorical efforts to force on a friendly nation 
an acceptance of the solution lue think best for her most per- 
plexing domestic problem. Next a sudden fear of Asiatic com- 
XXIV [ 8 ] 



THE GIRL 

petition stampedes us; and we instantly abandon, as to Orientals 
at least, our old boast that our land is the home of the oppressed 
of every clime, the land of opportunity for all who would better 
their condition. Straightway Congress is busy building dams 
on our western coast to keep the wave of slant-eyed invaders 
out, while our people rush into excesses against those who are 
in, reaching sometimes to riot, but more often merely to 
such refinements of cruelty as cutting off their pigtails or 
burning down their joss-houses. 

A cry that the money that was good enough for us should 
be good enough for our foreign debtors carries half the people 
captive ; a great national convention comes near nominating the 
chief advocate of this notion for the presidency, and the coun- 
try is on the verge of paying the national debt in greenbacks. 
A few years later, a rather cheap rhetorician catches the fancy 
of an excited assemblage by talking about crucifying the people 
on a cross of gold, and straightway there sweeps over the land 
like a prarie fire a wave of excitement for persuading water 
to flow uphill, and silver to be as good as gold without the 
advice or consent of any other nation on earth. Next we 
plunge into municipal affairs; give away priceless franchises 
because we are in such a hurry we can't take time to see what 
they are worth; borrow till we have exhausted the limit, and 
then mark up the value of our property in order to be able 
to borrow more upon it, and chuckle over every fresh million 
of debt incurred, as if this were the end of that trouble. We 
turn out a reform administration for not reforming fast enough, 
and instal Croker and Tammany to improve the job. We 
grumble that the town has been too straitlaced, rejoice that 
at last it is blissfully wide open, then wake up to find it in- 
tolerably wide open, and once more put in a reformer, finally 
threatening to turn him out again because everybody that 
voted for him hasn't in the first year got everything he wanted. 

For a long time we itch to interfere in Spain's trouble with 
her colony, and at last in a white heat over the explosion of a 
naval vessel we do rush into war, but not before being caught 
in the ebb of the same tide and swept by it into the sentimental 
declaration that we will never, no, never, permit our country 
XXIV [ 9 ] 



THE GIRL 

to reap from this cxpcndmire of its money and its young life 
such security and advantage as every other nation which ven- 
tures on the solemn sacrifice of the treasure and blood of its 
people has felt bound to require from the beginning of time, 
and was bound to require. Next the whole country is up in 
arms in another gush of sentiment to protest that instantly, 
without safeguards of any sort, a little island off in the Atlantic, 
more than a fourth of the way over to Africa, must be given 
admission at once to all the rights and privileges of American 
citizenship. Presently the sentimental wave turns the other 
way, and another island, nearer, larger, vastly more important, 
with vastly greater claims, over which we have asserted a species 
of protectorate for three-quarters of a century, and which 
we profess to be tenderly guiding into the family of nations, 
is kept waiting for months and years for help, long since ac- 
knowledged to be our plain duty. Far from being a mother 
to this suffering orphan, whom we have ourselves dragged 
to our door and dropped helpless there, we are exhibiting a 
capacity, colossal as our strength, for being a stepmother. 

Next we forget all about these burning issues, put them 
behind us as if they had never existed, and plunge pell-mell, 
clergy, editors, laity, and all classes and conditions of men, 
into a race with the politicians for the favor and the political 
influence of the downtrodden contract coal-miners, who were 
only getting three dollars a day, and had proclaimed against 
free labor in a so-called free country lest competition might re- 
quire them to work a little more than five or six hours a day, 
and make coal cheaper for the multitude. Thus between our 
own meddling, and the dull inactivity of the employers, idly 
dreaming that it will soon blow over, we prolong the industrial 
paralysis till winter is at hand, and the President himself is 
forced to intervene in an unprecedented way to save us from 
a national calamity. 

One day we go wild over a guest because he is the brother 
of an Emperor ; the next we arc in a pet because the same Em- 
peror wants to collect money from an umvilling debtor, who 
doesn't pay his debts to us either. One day we proclaim 
Russia as our dearest friend, and fret with but half -concealed 

XXIV [ ID ] 



THE GIRL 

contempt at Chinese complaints about the massacre of their 
countrymen in Wyoming, or Italian complaints about sim- 
ilar atrocities in Louisiana, or foreign comment generally on 
our burning of negroes at the stake; and the next day we are 
demanding that our Government shall at once and officially 
serve peremptory notice on that same dearest friend at St. 
Petersburg that we won't stand his equally wicked persecu- 
tion of Jews in Kishineff in the heart of Russia. We are bent 
on an isthmus canal at Nicaragua, and can hardly keep our 
hands off our ancient ally for attempting one at Panama ; we 
laugh loud and long at the De Lesseps collapse as proof of all 
we have said about the utter impracticability of the Panama 
route, then suddenly turn around, buy up the bankrupt, aban- 
don the Nicaragua concern, and set out to finish that same im- 
practicable and preposterous Panama scheme ourselves. 

Thus wave after wave of half-considered opinion sweeps 
over the country; we flash into flames of sudden excitement, 
which fortunately, for the most part, die out like heat-light- 
ning; feel equally fit to flout all the world's experience, solve 
at sight all its problems, or fight all creation at the drop of a 
hat, and are alw^ays in danger of going off at half-cock into a 
new party or out of it, into some untried policy or out of it, 
into some monstrous injustice or out of it, into war or out of it. 

A graver change, amounting to a distinct degeneration in 
the average American character, may be a further conse- 
quence, and is at any rate a further accompaniment of the 
tendency to loss of faith and loss of purpose. It is the ex- 
travagant notion, never held in the days of the Fathers, that 
this is a land of equality, and that one man is as good as an- 
other. It has never been a land of equality, and one man 
never has been as good as another, and never will be, in this 
country or any other, in this life or any other — till the just 
God turns unjust and the creature that does ill becomes in His 
eyes as the creature that does well. 

What is true, and it is the shining glory of the Fathers to 
have established it, is that this is a land where all men are on 
a par just once in their lives, for they have an equal start. 
Each man is guaranteed certain fundamental essentials at the 

XXIV [ II ] 



THE GIRL 

starting post — his life, his iifcrty, and the pursuit of happiness 
in his own way, so long as he respects the corresponding rights 
of others. Beyond that it is a fair field and no favor ; and from 
the very moment of the equal start some draw ahead and others 
lag behind. The equality has disappeared like the morning 
mist; the inequality that lasts to the end, and is greater here 
than anywhere else in the world, is the inspiring fruitage of 
those blessed republican institutions under which no man can 
be too low to rise to the top, if he is fit for it. 

But the delusion of equality remains and poisons. The lag- 
gard declares he is just as good as the man that has outstripped 
him, and that he is the victim of a monstrous injustice in 
being left behind. The spendthrift finds it iniquitous, since 
one man is as good as another, that he should be poor and 
needy, while the frugal and careful neighbor that started on an 
equal level with him is free from want. The idler swaggers 
up to his employer with the declaration that, since one man 
is as good as another, it is an imposition to pay him any less 
than the industrious workman at his side, and that he has 
a trades union at hand to prove and maintain it by a logic 
you can't resist. One man is as good as another, and therefore 
it is such an outrage to deprive a man of his vote merely be- 
cause he has been a thief or a murderer that the governor must 
pardon him before the expiration of his term in the peniten- 
tiary, in order that the cloud on his free and independent 
American citizenship may be removed, and he may resume his 
rightful share in the business of governing the country. 

This temper soon carries the false doctrine of equality one 
step further. It comes next that since one man is just as 
good as another, if the other doesn't think so he must be 
made to. In fact, if he does not agree with the devotees of 
the doctrine at a time when they have started out to enforce 
it on their employer, or on their associates, or on the community, 
he will do well to seek liberty to earn his living in some land 
of despotism — the home of the free is no place for him and 
is full of danger. The Walking Delegate is just about as 
obliging as the traditional foreman of the fire engine who 
said, "You may paint de machine any color you please, s'long's 

XXIV [ 12 ] 



THE GIRL 

you paint it red." You may do as you like in this land of 
liberty, so long as you do what our Union tells you. 

But let us be fair to the laboring-man, and even to his mis- 
representative, the Walking Delegate. This American intol- 
erance of dissent is not confined to the Trades Union. The 
powerful trust may be just as exacting and intolerant till its 
demands have once been successfully challenged; and it has 
not at times been bashful about making these demands on leg- 
islatures, on the courts, even on the highest departments of 
the Government, and on national candidates. It is thought 
to be not bashful at this moment in Wall Street about making 
them upon the inevitable candidates of the party in power. 
The party machine has been accused of the same intolerance 
of dissent; doctors and lawyers and bankers have small room 
for the inconsiderate man who dares differ from what for the 
moment are thought essentials by the temporary or local ma- 
jority; the tolerance of dissent has even been said to have 
reached into the Church. 

An acute observer has traced the turbulence of French 
history since the days of Mirabeau to a lop-sided belief in their 
Trinity, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. The controlling masses, 
he said, cared very little for Liberte and hardly more for Fra- 
ternite, but had a consuming, vitriolic appetite for Egalite. 
And so it came about that equality under the Emperor, First or 
Third, was better than liberty under the Citizen-King or under 
the Republic. 

Our doctrine that one man is just as good as another is car- 
ried farther still by its devotees: he is more than as good, he 
is better; or as the emancipated negroes loved to declaim in 
those deplorable reconstruction days, " De bottom rail's on top, 
bress de Lawd." So now it sometimes appears that if any 
man has the admitted povv^er to rule it is the ignorant man, the 
idle man, the vicious man. To him nearly every worldly wise 
person seems to think it prudent to kowtow; while the other 
kind must obey or else be clubbed or dynamited into submission. 

In such circumstances as we have been describing, mere 
noise, clamor, tumult, vociferous demand, becomes a social and 
XXIV [ 13 ] 



THE GIRL 

political force of the first liagnitude. Under its impulse the 
soberest and best elements of the community are not infre- 
quently swept into hasty conclusions which are afterward 
repented at leisure. Such, to take one single example out of 
many, was the sudden conversion of nearly everybody to the 
notion that arbitration is the most certain road to justice. Far 
be it from me to question or depreciate the admirable workings 
of this beneficent device, when both sides fairly enter into it, in 
fields to which it is adapted. But the sudden conversion I 
speak of is to the notion that it is in every sudden need always 
better than the courts and a cure-all for every ill. In con- 
sequence of the general unhesitating acceptance of this notion, 
if one side to a dispute is ready and eager for arbitration, the 
other is vehemently censured if it in turn hesitates for an 
instant at swallowing the nostrum. 

The old machinery of justice must be set aside; the time- 
honored tribunals for the protection of individual rights and 
the adjustment of conflicting interests between man and man, 
gradually evolved through long centuries of Anglo-Saxon de- 
velopment, are pronounced too slow, and too costly, and too 
uncertain ; the safe and sure thing is to compel — for nothing 
short of compulsion will satisfy these sudden converts — to 
compel both sides to appear before a new tribunal which can 
decide off-hand, unhampered by rules of procedure or techni- 
calities of law, according to intuition and sense and feeling. 
And so the man that balks at arbitration has lost his case 
already before the bar of that Public Opinion which rules the 
country. 

Who does not see, then, the special advantage this up-to-date 
contrivance for producing quick justice may often give the less 
deserving side? When the Walking Delegate, that new and 
powerful Peer of the Realm, hasn't been doing much for a 
week to convince his society that he is earning its pay, he has 
only to invent some new demand for shorter hours, or more fre- 
quent shifts, or fewer bricks in the hod, and when it is denied 
promptly calls for an arbitration. Now the essence of an ar- 
bitration, the only object of an arbitration, is to settle the thing, 
settle it cjuick, and make people contented again. But how can 
. XXIV [14 ] 



THE GIRL 

they be contented unless they get at least some part of what 
they claim? In ordinary disputes between individuals or 
classes an arbitration that didn't give something to both sides 
would be almost unheard of. An arbitration that doesn't more 
or less " split the difference" would be unusual. So the natural 
end of it is that the Walking Delegate gains the approval of his 
people and strengthens his position by showing that he has 
earned his salary; his society gains something out of the de- 
mand, where, till he invented it, nothing had been expected or 
wanted or thought of; and the employer gains — well, he gains 
q, settlement for the time being any way, till the Walking Del- 
'egate thinks of something else. 

Exactly the same results may be expected when an employer, 
being in the wrong in a dispute with his workmen, induces them 
to consent to an arbitration, excepting that then you have an- 
other influence coming in to modify the outcome — the instinctive 
sympathy all right-minded men feel for the weaker side in a 
controversy. Very nearly the same results may be expected 
when, among contending capitalists, the one who is getting and 
deserves the worst of it calls for an arbitration. Very nearly 
the same may be expected when a nation that sets up and ad- 
heres long enough to a preposterous boundary claim calls for 
an arbitration — unless, indeed, as in a recent case, the nation in 
the right is wise enough to get exactly half of the "arbitrators"! 
otherwise the unreasonable claimant can never be worse off 
than before, and the chances are in favor of his gaining at least 
something. No wonder arbitration, with all its recognized 
merits and its beneficent successes, has come to be held at a 
premium by the side that is in the wrong! Starting with noth- 
ing, that side must generally come out with something, anyway, 
to the good ! For the side that is in the wrong, therefore, the 
game is worth trying. 

Here I must bring to a close these too prolix illustrations of 
the changing temper and practice of our people, as we have 
been drifting out of sight of those old American safeguards of 
Faith and Purpose. But let no hearer for one moment forget 
that there is another side to the picture. Admitting all faults 
XXIV [ 15 ] 



THE GIRL 

and inconsistencies and hy^rical alternations of heat and cold, 
our people are still the freest, most generous, most capable, 
most active and daring; our country is still in our eyes the best 
the sun shines on. But we should be less its admirers, less 
loyal and less useful as its citizens, if we did not' face the known 
facts with open eyes. Remember, too, that what we see is but 
in the dawn of our new century, and before our entire national 
existence has yet anywhere near reached the span the Psalmist 
assigned for two human lives. When we get a little nearer 
national maturity, and when the gigantic forces of the Twen- 
tieth Century are really under full headway, where is all that 
incessant, restless fever of change to lead ? When the physical 
and moral whirl in which our national character is taking shape 
becomes still greater ; when the marvels of the past half-century 
have become the commonplaces or even the rejected crudities 
of the next; when the forces of steam are obsolete and elec- 
tricity is the slowest power we deal with; when our popula- 
tion instead of merely eighty millions approaches two hundred 
millions, as it surely must, long before the end of the century, 
as the scientific advances, which even such an age will count 
miraculous, burst upon us, what is the poor human American 
to do, in his present fever and with his present nerves, but with 
fivefold greater powers placed in his hands, and fivefold greater 
attention and capacity demanded for their control? If sixty 
years ago the free forces and rushing advance of the Republic 
urgently needed the regulation of a powerful and learned con- 
servative body, who can overestimate the necessity for such 
service now? 

When you ask how it is to be rendered, one cannot be mis- 
taken in turning first to those priceless qualities in any sound 
national life, whose tendency to decay we noted at the outset. 
Give back to us our Faith. Give back to us a serious and 
worthy Purpose. Restore sane views of life, of our own re- 
lations to it, and of our relations to those who share it with 
us. Moderation in our conceit of our own almightiness will 
surely follow, moderation in the intolerant assertion of our 
own rights, moderation in meddling with the rights of others, 
some tendency to thought before action, some continuity of 
XXIV [ i6 ] 



THE GIRL 

conduct personal and public, and some reference of policy to 
enduring principle. 

Outside the immediate and inestimable effect on the family, 
the conservative power of educated women will naturally show 
its first and perhaps its chief influence in the next greatest 
among the forces that guide the world — that of social life. 
They will surely help to check its degradation. They may make 
it regain its soothing relaxation, and its benign stimulus for 
the best in every one. They may even give back to society the 
inspiration it once had for the leaders of the world's work. 
They will certainly correct the prevalent vicious conception of 
its real scope. They will reject the notion that it is a sort 
of trade to which a few devote themselves as most others do 
to the other pursuits of life; that thus there are, in the vulgar 
phrase of the day, society women, just as there are shop women, 
or cleaning women, and that each class must stick to its trade : 
that, in fact, what is called our best society is a strictly limited 
sort of trades union, unfriendly to the admission of apprentices 
not coming from its own ranks, and that it is an imperative 
necessity for outsiders with social aspirations to force their 
way into it by push and notoriety, trick and device, if they 
would avoid social extinction! From this degrading con- 
ception comes the constant craze for newspaper publicity, 
and every other form of publicity; from this paltry scheming, 
the vulgar push, the endless flattery and insincerity and loss 
of self-respect by foolish aspirants, who seem all the time to 
ignore or be unconscious of the blighting influence, in the glare 
and heat and dust of such an arena, upon all the finer qualities 
that make women adorable and human life attractive. 

If the conduct of the so-called inner circles of society has 
sometimes seemed to justify this brazen uproar at their gates, 
so much greater the demand for the conservative influence and 
the real refinement that come from the higher training of supe- 
rior women. When other ideals are cherished, when faith and 
purpose in life reassert their sway, society will look for its leaders 
even less than it really docs to-day, to the embellished matrons 
still friskily playing tomboy, and noisily marshalling, for fresh 
XXIV [17] 



THE GIRL 

extravagances of social dcr^Rnor and amusement, their collec- 
tions of dashing young centaurs from the race-track and 
the hunting-field, and of handsome young cigarette-smoking 
experts from the bridge-table. 

When these higher ideals do return, the powerful influence 
of educated women will surely array, as never before, the best 
of their sex in compact, resistless phalanx against a social evil, 
alarming, degrading, and demoralizing, which has suddenly 
become almost too common to provoke surprise — the trans- 
formation of marriage from a sacrament of God into a thought- 
less and headlong business or social arrangement, to be dissolved 
almost at pleasure. Six hundred and fifty-four thousand per- 
sons divorced in this country in twenty years, and those not the 
last — such is the deplorable record on which Catholic and Prot- 
estant clergy are already appealing for a union of all moral 
agencies to retard this downward rush of the multitude. 

The same influence should help resist the yet more common 
weakening of family ties and destruction of family life. It 
should correct at the origin of the evil the extraordinaiy de- 
velopment of nervous excitability that accounts for so much of 
our fickleness of view and instability of belief; for the frequent 
outbursts of general turbulence and lawlessness through whole 
zones of population; for the varied and incredible character of 
the crimes, for the amazing publicity which attends them, and 
the ready imitation which the wide kno^vledge of every new 
crime often stimulates. 

Perhaps the same influence may even penetrate the citadels 
better intrenched, those of evils that come from the ill-judged 
excesses of the best of people. It may possibly infuse modera- 
tion into our new and admirable devotion to athletics, and 
rescue us from those vagaries of sport run mad that have made 
the football teacher more important in our universities than 
the professor of chemistry or of philosophy, and the record 
of the cinder-track the essential thing rather than the bacca- 
laureate degree. 

Harder task yet, it may restore sanity to our charity run 
mad ; may teach us the infinite harm that lurks in our lazy way 
of ridding ourselves from each casual beggar with a careless 
XXIV [ i8 ] 



THE GIRL 

quarter instead of a careful inquiry; and may even, after a time, 
stop the premium we put upon crime and crankiness when we 
build palaces for our lunatics and our criminals, and sustain 
them in these establishments in a comfort, and even luxury, 
far beyond the average of what the taxpayers who meet the 
bills can afford for themselves. Under your guidance the mod- 
erate conclusion may in fact be reached that, even for sweet 
Charity's sake, the upright, industrious New York farmer or 
mechanic or shopkeeper is not bound to house and feed the 
crank and the criminal better than he can the children of his 
loins and the wife of his bosom. 

Are the burdens thus laid out for the conservative and moder- 
ating influence of the educated women of the land too weighty 
to be borne ? I do not believe it. I am full of good hope for 
the future — more hopeful to-night than before I saw the late 
work of Vassar, more hopeful at every addition to the splendid 
array of its followers, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, 
Radcliffe, and the rest, with which our country now leads the 
world in the advanced education of women. 

But that you may not fall short of the full measure of your 
high capacities and still higher calling, let me ask your attention 
to a fact, and put to you a question about it. It is a fact, al- 
most a commonplace — at any rate, it is a fact which I venture to 
affirm, and believe to be beyond intelligent contradiction — that 
the young ladies here at eighteen average higher than any cor- 
responding body of boys at the same age in any corresponding 
institution. My question is. How will it be at twenty-eight? 
On your answer to that question depends our hope that the 
educated women of the country may furnish the conservative 
force of our land which the EngHsh philosopher led us to 
expect, and the Frenchman to see that we needed. 

Is it not the frequent experience that from the moment of 
entering society the girl almost stands still, — is at least surely 
and generally passed by the boy, — and that in maturity and mid- 
dle life the relative positions are apt to be reversed ? The ques- 
tion is not raised with any thought of suggesting competition. 
Among all the disagreeable things brought forward by the new 
XXIV [ 19 ] 



THE GIRL 

school, the most hateful is this thought of rivalry between the 
sexes, or of any necessary or natural antagonism of interests. 
My closing suggestion, then, with reference to the opportuni- 
ties before you, and the country's need of you is, not the duty 
of rivalry, but the duty of growth. For, never forget, it was 
merely of the body, not of the intellectual or the spiritual man, 
the declaration was made that you cannot by taking thought 
add one cubit to your stature. When a tree ceases to grow, 
your science teaches you that it should be harvested. When 
the sun ceases to rise, its shadows fall mournfully eastward and 
the day is surely drawing to its close. When you cease to 
grow you have already begun to decay. Grow then, while you 
live; grow to the full height of the duties we have seen. The 
land never needed you as it does to-day; you will never see a 
day in which it will not need you more and more. 



XXIV [ 20 ] 



XXV 



MANHOOD 

"THE SELECTION OF ONE'S LIFE WORK' 

BY 

E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 



J/f/^E. have dwelt long upon questions 0} youth, the early 
days, the period of preparation for the larger business 
of life. We have seen the grave mistakes which, in the opinion 
of our leaders, are apt to he made at every step. Turn now to 
the question of highest import. Childhood, the playtime, having 
been danced through somehow, to one tune or another, and being 
at last set aside, how shall we decide upon, how enter upon the 
career of manhood ? What path should each one of us follow ? 
And how shall each one know to select that path ? 

In this truly momentous issue we seek the advice of President 
Andrews of the University of Nebraska. The following address 
from his pen is here reprinted with his consent and by the courteous 
permission of Mr. E. Brisbane Walker, in whose Cosmopolitan 
Magazine it was originally printed. President Andrews has 
himself been so successful in his career that he may well counsel 
others. He has been successively principal of the Connecticut 
Literary Institute, President of Denison University in Ohio, 
President of Brown University, and Superintendent of the Chicago 
public schools before occupying his present distinguished position. 

The selection of the field in which one's life-work is to be 
done is a momentous act. A wise choice in the matter is in 
itself a fortune; an error in it can hardly ever be recalled, and 
nearly always involves losses and pain for which no good for- 
tune afterward can make amends. In every community one 
XXV [ I ] 



MANHOOD 

meets victims of ill guidai^^ in this all-important matter ; men 
who, at the critical point in the journey of life, took the wrong 
road. Some of them succumb quickly and die. Others wan- 
der aimlessly and hopelessly about, hardly attempting to ad- 
vance. Many another bravely struggles on, only to find, 
when all his strength is wasted, that the path is too rough, 
crooked, or long for him, or that it traverses country which he is 
constitutionally unable to love. Is it not inexpressibly sad 
that thousands of human lives should be rendered useless and 
unhappy in these ways? Cannot something be done to abate 
the evil? 

At first glance it is surprising that comparatively little has 
been written on a subject so important. The explanation 
probably is that the choice of a life-role constitutes in each 
instance a highly personal affair, in which it seems folly for any 
but the man himself to take part. And, certainly, the choice 
must finally be made by each for himself. Outside advice or 
hints, the best saws of sages or philosophers, can never, in this 
weighty business, take the place of our own insight, discretion, 
and will. 

Yet few solve the problem of a life-calling wholly without 
counsel. Consciously or otherwise we are, in our decision, 
helped by what we know of others' decisions. Reflections on 
the subject by students of human nature seeking the causes of 
success and of failure in life greatly aid many. It is believed 
that helpful direction of this kind may be extended further than 
it has yet been. There may also usefully be given some account 
of the special advantages and disadvantages of each several 
profession or calling, the rewards and amenities to be hoped 
for in it, and the temptations, hardships, and other infelicities 
which it devotees must brave. The present paper merely intro- 
duces the discussion of these topics, on which other writers, 
specialists, will enlarge. 

Certain favored spirits are never under the necessity of 
choosing their path in life. Most geniuses are such. They 
are foreordained to this or that mission and somehow become 
aware of it in good time. From his earliest boyhood Robert 
E. Lee, like young Hannibal of old, felt called to the profession 

XXV [ 2 ] 



MANHOOD 

of arms. Before he was ten Thorwaldsen carved beautifully 
in wood, excelling his father, whose trade it was, and evoking 
from many observant ones the prophecy that the lad would make 
a great sculptor. Probably no artist ever becomes famous 
who is not moved in the direction of his destiny quite early. 
And many a man neither a genius nor an artist is so obviously 
fitted for some particular occupation that he need never worry 
or even deliberate over the question in what field he shall earn 
his bread. All these cases, however, are exceptional : the ma- 
jority of human beings are not so fortunate. 

A man may be far from sure what business he ought to adopt, 
yet really have a pronounced aptitude in some special direction. 
In such a case the proper precept is: Follow your bent. If 
the subject possesses various species of ability but is peculiarly 
brilliant in some one, this, his main forte, is the thing to give 
him his cue. Highly versatile people, mentally alert, interested 
in all the departments of science and of fact, and having con- 
siderable but nearly equal powers in various ways, are in much 
danger of vacillation between two or more forms of endeavor, 
dawdling a while over each, till all their richness of faculty is 
spent and success impossible. The man preaches, we will say, 
until some reverse overtakes him at that work. Cast down, and 
aware that he can teach, instead of redoubling his efforts to 
succeed in the activity first chosen, he throws it up and crosses 
over, a beginner, to the school-room. Sooner or later he 
becomes discouraged here as well. Having once yielded to 
depression he probably falls prey to it again, now exchanging 
the school for the law-office. How many potentially invalu- 
able lives are wasted in such fatal meandering! 

Your dull fellow, lacking all special mental interest and with- 
out any sense of function or of power, may quite possibly turn 
out much better than that. If, somehow, he once gets launched 
in a given enterprise, being single-minded and free from dis- 
traction, he is likely to develop triumphant concentration of 
attention and energy. But how is he to make the start ? Per- 
haps arbitrarily, by a sort of flop, lunging for the first opportu- 
nity to work. Splendid results often wait upon such a choice. 
Better, however go bv friends' advice. President Francis 
XXV [ 3 ] 



MANHOOD 

Wayland used strongly to 4iRist that a man's friends are often, 
if not always, better judges of his qualifications for a given 
career than the man himself. Only, when he puts his hand 
to the craft picked out for him — this, too, formed part of Way- 
land's philosophy — he must determine to succeed and hence 
work like a demon. Interest in the undertaking, even devotion, 
wmII then come. 

Still more important is the judgment of acquaintances when 
a candidate inclines to a profession through some whim and 
not from any kind of rational consideration. A pious lad 
may fancy that he is called to holy orders, when the church 
or the bishop knows better. It often sorely taxes wit to break 
up a reasonless preconception like this, the victim, dominated 
by his one idea, being incorrigible; but friendship cannot 
possibly be better employed. Once in many cases the notion 
of duty for which no reason can be assigned seems to prove 
justified, the subject, when he has become successful, turning 
back to laugh at those who would have brought him to a differ- 
ent mind. It is true, notwithstanding, that a man can rarely 
with safety give himself to a course of life unless his fitness 
therefor rests upon specific qualities and powers of his so ob- 
vious that his intimates easily recognize them. 

Not seldom a victim of delusion in respect to his calling has 
been beguiled by doting parents. They devoutly wished their 
son to be, say, a minister; and therefore took it for granted, 
teaching him to do the same, that this v^-as his appointed des- 
tiny. Parents can commit no greater indiscretion than that, 
nor can a child be subjected to a deeper unkindness. Among 
the bitterest disillusionments which the writer has ever witnessed 
were those of young men who, trained all through the ardor 
of boyhood to suppose as a matter of both filial and religious 
duty that they were to become ministers, yet, possessing no 
taste or aptitude for that, at last, broken-hearted, saw their 
error, heroically renounced ministerial study and struck into 
other paths. So painful a rupture of family and personal ex- 
pectations requires immense courage, carrying with it corre- 
spondingly great danger of mean compromise. Youth should 
never needlessly be forced into so fiery a trial. 
XXV [ 4 ] 



MANHOOD 

If there are some who deem themselves suited to a calling 
when they are not, a much larger number foolishly dread 
suggested callings out of a belief that they could not succeed 
in them. I am no speaker, a man says; I cannot make either 
the law or the ministry my orbit. But you have vocal organs, 
and they can be cultivated. You may also possess all the neces- 
sary logical powers. Perhaps all you lack is training, infor- 
mation, and hard work. The majority of men have grea.ter 
versatility than they imagine. Within pretty large limits any 
fairly bright candidate can succeed reasonably well in any 
occupation to which he gives himself with sufficient preparation 
and energy. It cannot be too often or vehemently urged 
that in these days of desperate competition any man, a genius 
even, however perfectly adapted to his branch of activity, 
will fail unless he starts with a good outfit and then works 
hard early and late. On the other hand, in our era of special- 
ization, every profession has a number of facets. It may be 
true that you would fail as a pleader, but you might succeed 
splendidly as counsel, and perhaps rise to be a judge. You 
might successfully argue civil cases yet find it well to avoid 
criminal cases. One clergyman does best as a preacher; an- 
other, not a star in the pulpit, accomplishes vast good as a 
pastor. Nearly every profession is thus cut up, making place 
for diverse tastes and talents. 

Besides objections to the different spheres of professional 
enterprise based on fear of personal unfitness, numerous 
scruples connect themselves with the nature or circumstances 
of the callings themselves. To these we now attend. The 
observations offered are in each case simply suggestive, not 
exhaustive, indicating the scope and method of the inquiry, 
and leaving to other writers the larger and more special argu- 
ments constituting the case in extenso for and against each 
several profession. 

In proceeding with this provisional and illustrative study, 
let us consider, first, the office of the religious teacher. Despite 
all the modifications which this office has undergone, it is still 
a most influential one, and is certain to continue so. 

No doubt theology has greatly changed and is rapidly 
XXV [ 5 ] 



MANHOOD 

changing. Sacred books,^Rcc treated wholly as oracles, are 
more and more regarded as literature. Inspiration is ascribed 
to their spirit, not to their text. Actual faith is less and less 
based on philological or historical arguments. The great ru- 
brics of the creeds are in process of rewriting, old language 
being altered considerably and old emphasis much more. 
Church and synagogue are not venerated as in former years. 
Not only do sceptics and infidels ignore them, but the same 
is done by an increasing company among believers, on the 
ground that both institutions have renounced their pristine 
ideals, forgetting the poor and lowly. Nor does it yet appear 
where the revolution thus hinted at is to end. 

For all this, it would be folly to expect, as some seem to do, 
that the function of organized religion will be set aside. Re- 
ligion is an integral element of human nature; you cannot 
annul it. Moreover, its normal working is social, producing a 
community, which must have organizers, teachers, and leaders. 
Let the form, profession, creed, and specific aims of ecclesias- 
tical society change as they will, the society itself must remain, 
with most of its historic power ; officers for it will be in demand ; 
and their influence will continue immense. Newspapers and 
books can never supplant oral speech; nor will the desultory 
orator upon sacred topics ever take the place of the stated preach- 
er, who knows the people personally and sympathizes with 
their needs. Private pastoral counsel, too, no less than public 
religious instruction and admonition, can be counted upon as 
among society's permanent resources for improvement. 

A young man meditating entrance upon the sacred office 
may, therefore, be sure that if he does v/ell in it he will never 
lack occupation or influence. The vocation, besides, possesses 
many elements of attractiveness. Incessant converse with the 
highest truths is a rare privilege, which religious teachers almost 
alone can enjoy. This, as well as the entire nature of their 
work, tends to evoke in sincere men of the cloth a certain beau- 
tiful refinement and spirituality of mind which few others 
can attain. Their manner of life moves them to self-denial, 
charity, and kindness, helping them to rate worldly fortune 
as not the highest good. Clerg}^meD even the busiest, get 
XXV [ 6 ] 



MANHOOD 

opportunity for reading beyond most others, and in consequence 
the clergy probably average to be better informed than any 
other profession. Also, no other furnishes so large a pro- 
portion of good speakers. 

Clerical work, of course, has certain infelicities, although 
several of these which are often and pre-eminently mentioned 
are much less forbidding than is commonly supposed. 

As reported, Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale recently re- 
marked: "Young men come to me asking what vocation they 
shall choose, and when I suggest the ministry they throw up 
their hands in dismay and respond that they cannot lead a life in 
which they are compelled to follow to the letter the dictates of 
another." 

Such youth evidently judge that to secure ordination, or 
retention in the ministry after ordination, they must slavishly 
follow some creed. Formerly, and indeed not very long ago, 
there was reason for this solicitude even in the more enlightened 
communions; but the danger is rapidly lessening, being now 
rare, local, and ready to disappear. Religious people apprais- 
ing a leader think much less of his creed than formerly, much 
more of his spirit and character. If they find him sensible, 
serious, thoughtful, eager to do men good, they are usually 
not unwilling to let him separate and preach as he pleases, 
even if he should vent a good deal of what they deem 
heresy. 

Much is made of the fact that congregations sometimes 
. dismiss their ministers on mere caprice, and that clergymen 
over fifty are less in demand than younger and less able com- 
petitors. That cases of such injustice and folly occur no ob- 
server can doubt; but we believe them relatively rare. Often 
the fault is emphatically not in the congregation but in the 
incumbent or candidate, who has remitted zeal and becomes 
selfish and unprogressive ; no fit example, leader, or instructor. 
Suffering parishes do not publish their griefs so readily as dis- 
placed clerg)'mcn do. 

We here face one of the real infelicities of the holy calling, 
the temptation which it offers to be indolent. In no other 
sphere of life is one so destitute as here of effective spur to hard 
XXV [ 7 ] 



MANHOOD 

and incessant toil. So far as the employment of his time is 
concerned, the clergyman is his own master. If he will, he 
can rise late and idle away the best hours nearly every day. 
He can gad about, attend parties, lounge at his club or sleep, 
with little fear that any parishioner will take him to task in time 
to do him any good. Many fall victims to this seduction, 
postponing work to pastime and contracting habits of idleness, 
at length losing all power of application and being deservedly 
cast aside for better men. 

Another extremely real temptation besetting clergymen 
is that to insincerity, arising from the routine character of their 
ministrations. The very business which engages them being 
of a sacred nature, they come to consider their performance 
of it as of necessity proper in temper. But it need not be so. 
Good habits are highly dangerous to morality, more so than 
aught else save bad habits. Liturgical acts executed in a 
careless spirit cannot but result in hollow character. 

More than any other servant of the public a pastor of a church 
is in peril from what we may term " coddling." If he is popular, 
and often when he is not so, many praise every utterance of his 
as "eloquent," "scholarly," "most edifying," or as noteworthy 
in some other aspect. Elderly ladies are a clergyman's worst 
enemies in this. Their habit of greeting him after each service 
with those stupidly laudatory estimates of his effort is not all. 
Foolishly tender incjuirics about his health follow. He seems 
to them to look pale and to need rest. Will he not please be 
good to himself, remit his arduous spiritual labors for a few • 
days, and go recuperate at yonder retreat? Some fear that 
this will not suffice; the reverend gentleman must take a tour 
in Europe. They raise the money for this purpose, and bundle 
the sturdy victim off upon the next Liverpool steamer. How 
often is not a clergyman's self-respect undermined in ways like 
these! Worse influence upon his character could hardly be 
imagined, unless it were being sent abroad at the expense of 
some one rich parishioner. Every offer of such a personal dona- 
tion let the minister resolutely decline, unless he wishes terri- 
bly to impair his moral sensibility and his power to bless men. 
If it never thus mortgaged itself to Dives in the pew, the pulpit 
XXV [ 8 ] 



MANHOOD 

would have little reason to dread the danger of speaking out 
against social wrongs. 

We hope it is made clear in the above that the clerical 
calling, if entered upon and pursued in the right spirit, is a 
useful and honorable one, and that more of those who possess 
the necessary qualifications for it ought to be encouraged to 
adopt it. 

The lawyer, like the clergyman, is to continue with us, a 
necessary factor in social administration. The notion which 
seems to prevail that lawyers' work is unnecessary is untenable. 
Activity in the legal line is, in some form or other, indispensable. 
Civilization renders society complex. The complexity early 
becomes so dense that those not bred to the mystery, of course 
the great majority, are unable to understand the relations 
which society has come to hold toward its members or those 
which the members hold one toward another. Much legis- 
lation and legal procedure, many practices of judges and of 
lawyers, are certainly most wry and not at all necessary, and 
we may look for improvement in this respect; but law practice 
itself will not pass away. Moreover, the net result of lawyers' 
work is advantageous. With all their faults, lawyers probably 
settle out of court more cases than they litigate. 

Prejudice against lawyers is very general and strong. Many 
believe that lawyers always act insincerely. Many consider 
every lawyer a liar, taking it to be the lawyer's express aim in 
pleading cases to try and make the worse appear the better 
reason. This misapprehension perhaps arises from the fact 
that even the most reputable attorneys are known at times to 
defend persons and cases secretly believed by them to be un- 
worthy. Superficially this habit seems indefensible, and people 
naturally conclude that if the best attorneys are guilty of it 
the entire profession deserves ill repute. 

But is it true that a bad case at law should not be defended, 
and that the lawyer championing such should in all instances 
be blamed ? It is not true. 

Perhaps one in a thousand real criminals would secure 
fair treatment if undefended; but the vast majority, were there 
no friendly scrutiny of the evidence against them, were they 
XXV [ 9 ] 



MANHOOD 

left to be dealt with, frcc^Fom all check, by the average jury 
or judge, liable to prejudice, passion, or both, would inevitably 
receive sentences undeservedly severe. And taking a great 
many cases together, it is probably best that the guilty man's 
counsel should not only plead all palliating circumstances, 
but should go further and place the client in the most favorable 
light which can be thrown upon him. If in this way justice 
is sometimes foiled, it almost certainly gains on the whole. 

There is, however, a practice somewhat analogous to that 
of defending criminals which we believe to be illegitimate, 
deserving of reprobation, and to this practice is largely due 
the popular harsh estimate of the legal profession. A wealthy 
corporation, let us suppose, wishes to carry through some 
scheme which is disadvantageous to the community. It re- 
tains as counsel for this purpose some legal gentleman who 
is eminent as a citizen. The gentleman permits himself to 
"appear" on behalf of the corporation, well knowing that 
what it is hoped to secure through him is, not the exhibition of 
his client's case in the best producible color (which would be 
proper and right), but the influence, on that side, of his person- 
ality as a citizen. Often the counsel "appears" and that is 
all ; he does not utter a word. Although analogous to legitimate 
advocacy, no doubt an outgrowth from that and owing to that 
its life, this habit is not legitimate advocacy. It is a form of 
bartering one's name for money, a huckstering transaction 
in which the attorney treats his reputation as a commodity. 

Clearly lawyers, like clergymen, have their special tempta- 
tions. If the priest may become hollow-hearted in his way, 
the man of law may crawl to the same level by a path all his own. 
He comes in contact with men's meaner side. He is often 
rasped by clients, snubbed by the court, insulted by opposing 
counsel. At times he is as good as obliged to play a part, to 
seem to wish what he does not and not to wish what he actually 
docs wish. Hypocrites may certainly result from this masquer- 
ade ; yet they are no necessary product of it. Upon reflection 
it does not appear that a devotee of the law need find it on the 
whole at all harder to maintain a solid and upright character 
than a man in any other walk. 

XXV [ lo ] 



MANHOOD 

If now and then one calls doctors quacks, betraying a 
prejudice against medical men similar to that felt against 
lawyers, the sentiment in this case is certainly less general 
and powerful than in the other. Medicine nearly all deem a 
noble calling. The trained physician. is a benefactor to the 
community; in the alleviation of men's immediate and most 
conscious ills, his work is beneficent beyond any other human 
mission. No other class of public servants, not even clergy- 
men, exhibit greater unselfishness or perform a larger amount 
of unpaid service. 

Disinclination to enter the medical profession is usually 
based on other objections. Many dislike a physician's life as 
involving constant contact with what is morbid, with disease, 
wounds, and death. 

Certain young men of a fine mental type are repelled from 
the profession because of its alleged unscientific character. 
Such ought to specialize in surgery ; for this, now that anaesthesia 
and asepsis are both in the field, is a science indeed, whose 
progress in recent years is nothing less than astounding, as de- 
lectable to the scientific sense as it is benign in view of the 
maladies which it heals. 

It is hardly just any longer to speak of medicine itself as 
not scientific, if by medicine is meant the sum total of present 
knowledge on the subject. Confessedly the science of medicine 
to-day is far in advance of the practice. Right here, in fact, 
one would think, earnest youth might find a powerful motive 
for becoming physicians. By thorough preparation in the 
first place, followed by tact and persistence in practice, patients 
and their friends may be brought to submit to rational pro- 
cedure in disease, letting it supplant those time-honored but 
pernicious methods to which such hordes now yearly succumb. 
Another consideration favoring choice of the medical profession 
ought to be found in the magnificent opportunity offered every 
practitioner to-day to substitute the prevention of disease, 
through inculcation of hygiene and sanitation, for the work 
of trying to remedy disease when it supervenes. 

No one would object to entrance upon the teacher's mission 
on the ground of its being not useful or worthy. It is one of 
XXV [ II ] 



MANHOOD 

the distinctly and iincquJ^cally honorable callings. Every 
grade of it from the highest down to the lowest offers oppor- 
tunity for invaluable helpfulness to the public and to the 
race. 

This vocation also, however, has its drawbacks. Teachers' 
remuneration is as a rule low in comparison with their exertions. 
The highest salaries which instructors of youth receive are far 
beneath those common among lawyers, physicians, and busi- 
ness men. If you become a pedagogue you resign expectation 
of acquiring wealth, unless from some source outside your 
occupation. Another and a much unhappicr circumstance 
attending this line of life is its liability to make its devotee a 
recluse, out of touch with the active, earnest affairs of men. 
Unless on his guard, he becomes dried-up, crusty, misanthropic. 
This danger at first seems unaccountable, owing to the teacher's 
privilege of constantly standing face to face with children and 
youth, who are wide awake, ardent, and buoyant. But while 
he indeed confronts these, he can hardly mingle with them very 
much. The fact that the teacher is forever talking down, 
addressing those who know less than he, and never his equals, 
inclines him to pedantry also, the characteristic vice of the 
profession. 

Journalism is the profession which one least likes to recom- 
mend a young man to undertake. Being approached for advice, 
you always hope that the applicant, if he tries newspaper work, 
will rise above the position of a mere drudge reporter, while 
you can rarely if ever be sure that he will climb high enough to 
be independent. The business of gathering news is respectable 
and very useful, and there is no reason why one engaged in 
it should not perfectly maintain his honor. The same is true 
of editorial or high-class journalistic writing, in which one is 
permitted to speak his mind. But between these two sorts of 
journalistic functionaries there is a third most unenviable 
type. We refer to the writers who, to retain their situations, 
must every now and then defend doings and policies which 
they abhor. In every occupation a subordination often pain- 
fully near to humiliation will at times be found necessary till 
you show yourself a master in the business and mount toward 

XXV [ 12 ] 



MANHOOD 

the top. But such servitude is believed to be nowhere else so 
complete as in the phase of journalism just referred to. 

Drawing upon paragraphs in the writer's little book "Wealth 
and Moral Law," we next enter a plea in favor of "business" 
in the usual sense — the winning, or the effort to win, wealth. 
The existence of wealth is morally legitimate. Whatever is 
needful to the life and weal of man has a right to be. Wealth 
is certainly such. It is simply humanity's stock in trade, men's 
tools and machinery wherewith to get their living. Without 
a vast supply of such instrumentalities the very existence of our 
race in its present extent would be impossible. Comfort, culture, 
civilization, would be still further out of the question. So 
long as all must use each moment of time and ounce of strength 
in fighting hunger, savagery is the inevitable lot. 

Wealth is necessary not as an evil but as a good. Confess- 
edly, it is often hoarded with an evil intent, and often put to 
wrong uses; but we should be foolish to stigmatize it as an evil 
on this account. No one calls machinery' an evil because of 
its friction, although, as far as man's present knowledge ex- 
tends, the friction is inevitable. The ills attending wealth are 
much more likely than those of machinery to be some day 
eliminated. 

The wealth, however large, of one man does not necessarily 
involve the poverty of any other man. It is a great error to 
suppose that the wealth of the world, or of any community, 
is a fixed, limited sum, like the shares in a bank, so that, if you 
should get a dollar more than you now have, I must put up with 
a dollar less than I now have. There are cases indeed where 
one's gain involves another's loss; where, that is, a man's gain 
is got through open or occult legal or illegal robbery. But 
wealth can increase, increase to any sum, without this or any 
injustice. 

Hence — whatever may at some future time be the case — as 
things are, it is no sin to get rich. This is not the same as saying 
that wealth is legitimate, because vast wealth might be present 
without a single rich man — precisely what socialists wish and 
expect. Should their regime ever be launched and work as 
they predict, private riches would be wrong. But, under the 
XXV [13] 



MANHOOD 

prevalence of our present individualistic system, v^hich, mark, 
no one and no group of us can change at will, the private massing 
and holding of wealth not only does not necessarily involve 
aught of injury to anyone, but may, and perhaps in most cases 
does, benefit all concerned. 

It is often said that one cannot with any assurance of success 
engage in business as now pursued without resorting to immoral 
and dishonorable practices. Painfully much as such a statement 
has to go upon, it is too sweeping. Fraud and underhandedness 
are doubtless common in most businesses; yet we can see, look- 
ing in any direction, respectable competencies built up no 
dollar of which is any wise tainted. Without too great strain 
upon charity, we may suppose that many vicious business 
methods are resorted to out of ignorance, and will be disused 
when they are understood. And there is reason to hope that 
business men's consciences as well as their minds are receiving 
light. This is largely due to the fact that so many men of 
determined integrity have pursued business careers without 
ever descending from the plane of honor. 

If there is a profession which more safely than any other 
can be recommended as peculiarly enticing in itself, vastly 
and directly useful to mankind and not as yet overcrowded, 
it is engineering in its various phases and branches — civil, chem- 
ical, mechanical, electrical, mining, sanitary, hydraulic. En- 
gineers' work, the subjection of man's material environment 
to man's service, is only well begun. It must and will go on, 
and it will go far very soon. Probably no man living has more 
than the faintest foregleam of the development which even the 
next fifty years have in store for this feature of our civilization. 
The force working here will have to be vastly enlarged. Only, 
be it observed, numbers are here, as elsewhere, of much less 
consequence than quality. If thorough preparation for one's 
profession is always important, as is certainly true, it is specially 
vital to success in engineering, where so much depends on exact 
knowledge, where mathematics and acquaintance with physical 
laws figure so conspicuously. Besides being in a high degree 
both useful and intellectual, engineering is a form of activity in 
which, if you are thoroughly qualified for it and unremittingly 
XXV [ 14 ] 



MANHOOD 

industrious, excellent remuneration may be expected, and that 
without resort to doubtful devices. 

At the risk of offending some readers and surprising more, 
we venture, lastly, to speak of politics as in itself a highly desirable 
profession. Good citizens who are so situated that they can 
compete for public ofhce ought to be encouraged to do so. No 
more useful career is possible in this age than is presented by 
politics conscientiously prepared for and pursued. The com- 
mon thought that it is mean to seek office or to accept an office 
unless it has sought the man, is wholly perverse. We need 
that hosts of thoroughly able and moral young men, well trained 
in political and social science, including ethics, should set 
politics before themselves as their life-work. Do not sneer 
at professional politics if only it is of the right kind. Politics 
ought to be a profession. Rightly followed, it would be a 
noble one. 

To be a public servant after this fashion would require 
extraordinary grace. To succeed, one must religiously cultivate 
the hard side of his nature, never to face wicked men, kindly 
to endure lies, libels, and the whole contradiction of the public's 
enemies against him, to give blows as well as take them. 
Where arc the men who will covet political careers with this 
spirit, preparing for, and if possible entering, public life with 
a determination to make it purer and more efficient, not wait- 
ing to be asked and urged to do this, but seeking places of trust, 
competing with selfish schemers for chances to exert great 
power in the capital afi"airs of men? 



XXV [ 15 ] 



XXVI 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

"COLLEGE TRAINING AND THE BUSINESS MAN"^ 

BY 

CHARLES F. THWING 

PRESIDENT OF WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY 



TpOR a moment here we face the intensely practical. 
There is a cry throughout the business world that the 
college education must justify itself or must disappear from among 
men of business, that its acquisition is an ornament to the idle_ 
rich, a necessity perhaps to the lawyer and the doctor, but that 
it must be dispensed with by those who seek practical success 
in a wider field. Such a movement would be a reversal of the 
wheels of progress. Yet to dismiss the outcry as mere ignorance 
and narrowness is a folly possible only to the narroiv and the 
ignorant. A thoughtful attempt is here made by Dr. Thwing 
to view the question from all sides, to see why and when the college 
man fails and why and when he succeeds beyond his less favored 
brethren. 

As our author hints, the problem is really one dependent on 
the individual. No amount of education whatsoever can make 
brains. It can only develop them. To measure a peculiarly 
able and energetic young fellow who lacks a collegiate educa- 
tion against a weakling who has been given opportunities 
beyond his calibre, who possesses a sword he cannot wield, 
this is idle talk. Dr. Thwing measures the best against the 
best, points out frankly where the college seems to fail, and, 
though a college president himself, shows no partiality for his 
own side of the question. He quotes successful men from every 
point of view. His conclusion does not urge any promiscuous 

^ Reprinted by special permission from The North American Review, 
Copyright, 1903, by The North American Review Publishing Co. 
XXVI [ I ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

rush oj all young men to eiftaiional insiiluiions, hut only points 
out the value oj higher training for certain youth under certain 
clearly marked conditions. 

The world is becoming a vast industrial condition. The 
basis of society is changed from the military and the domestic 
to the economic and industrial. The conquest of the world 
by aggressive peoples is now made rather through the locomotive 
and the steel bridge than through the rifle. In this condition 
the United States is a leading power. But these industrial 
forces which spread themselves round the world are the strongest 
at home. The United States is both a vast machine-shop and 
a vast farm; and what lies between the shop and the farm is 
covered by equally vast systems of railroads. These conditions 
are formed into great combinations of individuals and of capital. 
From the individual to the partnership, from the partnership 
to the corporation, from the corporation to the combination 
of corporations commonly known as the trust, is the order of 
development. 

This industrial process and also the unifying process in 
industry will undoubtedly continue. A great financier of New 
York has recently said that the uniting of banks and financial 
institutions would continue, if men could be found to manage the 
resulting combinations. 

To this condition, therefore, in which the United States finds 
itself, as a manager of enormous business interests, what is the 
relation of the American college ? What can the American col- 
lege do to make these interests more worthy of humanity and 
more helpful to the noblest and richest life ? What, too, can the 
American college do to make these business interests themselves 
more efficient and more remunerative? 

The principal means which the American college can use in 
helping the industrial condition lies in the furnishing of well- 
equipped workers. But some affirm that the college does not 
equip, much less well equip, its graduates to be workers in the 
world's hard work. A leader in American industrial life says: 

"I do not think that the college graduate has any ad vantages 
in entering business over the graduate of a high or grammar 
XXVI [ 2 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

school. My preference has always been for boys to come to me 
direct from school and at the age of eighteen, because my expe- 
rience has shown me that the four years spent in college are not 
worth as much to him, if he is to become a business man or 
manufacturer, as the same time in actual business experience. 
The average college graduate is apt to feel that he is so edu- 
cated that he is disinclined to begin at the bottom; or, if the case 
is exceptional and the young man is wiUing to begin on the 
lowest round of the ladder, he often becomes discouraged by 
seeing younger fellows in positions several years in advance of 
him. There is a great deal to be gained by the discipline 
of daily life that comes with drudgery, such as the washing of 
ink-stands, cleaning windows, carrying bundles, and sweeping 
out the store, although, unfortunately for the boy's own good, 
the conditions are such at the present day that he is not called 
upon to do that work as was the custom a generation ago. I 
used to say that I did not care to hire a boy who owned a dress 
suit. Of course, there are exceptions; but, if one wants to 
succeed as a business man, he must begin by making sacrifices, 
and anything which shows a tendency toward extravagance 
is not a promising indication. I would advise a boy of eighteen 
who wants to become a merchant, a business man, or a distribu- 
tor of products, to go into the business at that age and not go to 
college. I would not, however, underrate a college education. 
For a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, or a successful member 
of any of the other learned professions, I believe the university 
education is almost a necessity. The primary object of all 
education should be to teach boys and girls how to provide 
for themselves food, clothing, and shelter." 

The proposition which I desire to support is, that the graduate 
of the American college, other things or qualities being the same, 
is best fitted to administer the great industrial movement. He 
is the one who, on the whole, can most wisely lead and most 
effectively carry forward the business interests of the United 
States. 

In order to get a fair field for our discussion, it may be just 
as well at once to clear away certain difficulties. Let me say 
at once that certain boys should not go to college. Boys who 
XXVI [ 3 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

dislike study should no^fo, for they are in peril of becoming 
social rebels and pessimsts. Boys who cannot bear freedom 
should not go, for they are in peril of becoming slaves to un- 
worthy habits. Boys who are lazy should not go, for they are 
in peril of adopting a soft, luxurious life, which it is difficult to 
throw off and which ill becomes the hard worker in the work- 
aday world of the new America. Of course, the number of 
boys of these three classes is not small. The going to a college 
is not a question touching the mass, it is a question touching 
the individual. Whether the son of a family should or should 
not go to college is a question as personal as was the question 
whether the parents of that son should in the first place become 
husband and wife. 

It is also evident that certain business callings demand a 
technical training. This training may be given, in part at 
least, through a college of liberal learning, or it may be given 
through a technical or scientific school. The work of the en- 
gineer, civil, mechanical, electrical, demands such a training. 
This training is as necessary to the engineer as is the training 
in law to the lawyer, or in medicine to the physician. Whether 
the engineer, before taking his technical studies, should first have 
the ad vantage of a general college course is a question which does 
not immediately relate to the present discussion, although be it 
said in passing that opinion is coming to favor the view that the 
technical school is purely a professional school. 

The present discussion, moreover, does not concern the gen- 
eral advantages of a college course. These advantages, in the 
form of making desirable friendships, promoting a high type 
of the gentleman, inspiring one to nobler service for society 
and the state, no one seeks to depreciate. They are great. Even 
were there no other results, they would make the college course 
worth while to most men. A graduate who entered the cattle 
business, in which, too, he was not successful, says of his 
college course: 

"I think I am safe in saying that if I had the decision to 

make over again I should again take the college education. 

It may not make great returns on the investment, in actual 

money, but to the man who has the taste and determination 

XXVI [ 4 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

it makes, I feci, adequate returns in the enlarged field he is 
given for the pursuits of his life with happiness to himself 
and with some benefit to those about him." 

Now to the main proposition: The college man in business 
is worth more than the same man would be without a college 
education. The elements that go to make up the value of the 
business man to his business arc many; and the elements 
which go to make up the value of the college to the student 

are also many. 

First of them all is the intellectual element. The leader in 
a great business primarily needs, of all the intellectual parts, 
the power to think. "What do the men whom you employ," 
I asked the manager of one of the great industrial combinations, 
' ' need the most ? " " Brains ' ' was the prompt answer. ' ' What 
do those men lack?" I said to a great manufacturer of steel 
and iron products. "Accuracy, the power to take a large 
view and to investigate thoroughly," was the reply. The 
merchant and the manufacturer are called on to analyze and 
synthesize phenomena, to relate fact to fact and truth to truth, 
to assess every fact or truth at its proper value, to determine 
the significance of the symbol, to reason logically, to relate 
principle to rule and rule to principle, to trace effect to cause, 
to distinguish the essential from the accidental, and to hold 
the necessary and essential under a large variety of conditions 
and circumstances. 

These are the very intellectual qualities which the college 
is supposed to discipline. The knowledge which one gains in 
college is of no, or small, consequence. In fact, knowledge as 
an end is vastly overestimated in all educational judgments, and 
knowledge as a means to power is as vastly underestimated. 
Two friends of mine have recently said to me, in answer to 
my question regarding the good of a college course to them, 
that it consists in the cuUivation of the primary intellectual 
quality of thinking. One says: "College training teaches one 
to go to work at any task with system and method, in the con- 
sciousness that one has acquired the ability to think through, 
quickly and logically, the questions which come up"; and 
another says: "College training has enabled me to appreciate 
XXVI [ 5 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 



more full)' and to praclis^|)iorc diligently precision and S3'stcm. 
Unless I am very muc^^iistaken the close of my academic 
life finds me much stronger from the point of view both of 
synthesis and of analysis." 

The men now at the head of great industrial corporations 
believe that this intellectual quality is of great value. Mr. 
W. F. INIcrrill, First Vice-President of the New York, New 
Haven & Hartford Railroad Company, says: 

"It has been my experience that men with a college edu- 
cation make better help than men of about the same calibre 
who have not had that advantage, when they get to a point where 
their experience warrants putting them into advanced positions ; 
and that it does not take them so long a time to get to a point 
where they can be safely promoted. A college education gives 
a young man habits of study and application which are in- 
valuable. He learns how to use his brains to better advantage 
than one who has not had that training. You might just as 
well say that an apprenticeship is of no value to a man who is 
going to follow a particular trade as to say, in the case of a 
man who is going to use his brains, it is not an advantage to him 
that he should learn how to use them logically by study. Brains 
are capable of development the same as muscles, and there is 
nothing that I know of that will develop brains any faster 
than systematic study. A well-trained mind thinks more 
quickly and reaches results more speedily and more accurately," * 

In the personality of the individual student the chief effect 
of the college is intellectual, and the chief element in this effect 
is the increase in what, in a comprehensive and general way, 
one calls the power of thinking. But this is not the only effect. 
Intellectual elements do not alone constitute the causes that pro- 
mote the prosperity of the individual or of the community. 
Some would say that volitional, emotional, ethical elements 
constitute causes more important than the intellectual. It is 
certainly true that a strong will makes as much toward the ad- 
vancement of one or of all as a clear intellect. For in a strong 
will are embodied ambition, diligence, persistence — qualities 

1 " The Utility of an Academic Education: an Investigation," R. T- 
Crane, p- 27. 

XXVI [ 6 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

most valuable. Some would also say that an honest conscience 
is as important as either clear intellect or strong will. 

Now, the training of the will in the college is a thing much 
more diiiicult to accomplish than the training of the intellect. 
For the will is trained by doing, and doing is not the primary 
function of the college, though it is one of its functions. This 
inability of the college to train the will in adequate ways is the 
chief cause of the impression that a college education is of no 
advantage to the business man, the man whose life consists so 
largely in doing things. But let no one suppose that the college 
does nothing in the training of the will. Every effort of the 
student to master a scholastic problem is an act of the will. 
Every decision he makes for better or for worse is an act of the 
will. All co-operative endeavors of college men, and such en- 
deavors are numerous and of great variety, represent the execu- 
tive function. Not a few men in every college class get larger 
training for their will than for their intellect. 

But now reverts the question of intellectual relations. Let 
it be granted that the modern business man docs need the power 
of thinking. How does the college increase this power more 
effectivelv than business itself? 

Thinking is an art. It is, of course, also, a science. But 
for the college man it is primarily an art. An art is learned by 
practising it. Thinking is, therefore, learned by thinking. It 
represents habits of intellectual accuracy, discrimination, com- 
parison, concentration. Such habits are formed by being 
accurate, discriminating, and by the actual concentration of 
the mind. A course in education promotes such thinking better 
than a course in business. For education represents orderli- 
ness and system in intellectual effort. The effort proceeds by 
certain graduated steps, from the easy to the less easy, from the 
difficult to the more difficult. The purpose is to train in the 
valuation of principles, which underlie all service, and not in 
the worth of rules, which are of special and narrow application. 
The man trained only in business of one kind is not fitted to 
take up business of a different kind. The broadly trained 
man is prepared to learn business of any kind, and if business 
of one kind has been learned he is able to leave it to take up 
XXVI [ 7 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

work of another kind wumoiit difficulty. The practice of any 
art should make the one who practises this art a better thinker 
in it ; but this advantage relates in a large degree to one who has 
first approached the art through thinking. 

I suppose it may be said that the man who is self-educated 
is usually very narrowly educated. He is educated along and 
in certain lines. He is educated, so to speak, tangentially. His 
thinking, too, is usually tangential. It lacks comprehensiveness 
and a sense of relations. It has force, and the endeavors which 
spring out of it are forceful; but breadth is sacrificed. 

Many and of much variety arc the methods adopted to relieve 
the individual of the necessity of educating himself. Schools 
of correspondence and evening schools have their place, and 
for not a few the place is large. So thoroughly worth while are 
these forms of education that they should be promoted, their 
weaknesses eliminated, and their points of strength conserved. 
But the peril against which one is to be on guard in these more 
or less informal methods is the peril of substituting knowledge 
for thinking, information for personal inspiration, formal con- 
tent of learning for large power of achievement. 

These perils inhere alike in the more popular and informal 
methods of education and in that technical and commercial edu- 
cation which the individual gets in business. The education of 
the college and university seeks to avoid these perils. The uni- 
versity offers opportunities for reasoning and for thinking of all 
kinds, degrees, orders. It sets forth the exact reasoning of the 
mathematical sciences — sciences in which things are as they are, 
as Bishop Butler says, and must be as they must be. It thus con- 
firms the habit of intellectual conviction. It sets forth the gen- 
eral reasoning of language, literature, history, and philosophy, in 
which truth is to be separated from truth for seeing each more 
clearly, in which truth is to be united with truth for establishing 
both more firmly. It uses analysis and synthesis. It uses 
deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. It recognizes the 
uncertainties attending intellectual judgments; a recognition 
which fixes a habit of intellectual humility. It seeks to assess 
each fact at its proper value, to use right methods of intellectual 
procedure, to maintain each faculty of man's whole being in 
XXVI [ 8 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

the performance of its proper function, without interference 
from other faculties, and to bring forth a well-ordered char- 
acter as the consummate result. 

In this endeavor the content of knowledge plays a less im- 
portant part than is commonly believed. Content of knowledge 
for intellectual processes is somewhat akin to content of food 
for physical processes; the purpose is not to retain the content 
but to convert the content into health and power. In the in- 
tellectual relation, too, as in the physical, one's appetite Is a 
pretty good guide for the selection of content. Certainly no 
other guide is so good, or so little unworthy, unworthy as at 
times it may prove to be. To choose certain courses of study 
in college because one docs not like them, on the ground that 
the dislike represents a certain lack of nature which these studies 
may help to fill, may have a certain degree, though small, of 
reasonableness. Such choices are medicines. Medicines are 
necessar}^, if one be sick. But the mind of the college man 
should be treated as if it were in a state of health. It, therefore, 
needs, not medicine, but food. To choose courses of study 
in college because one does like them represents the hygienic 
process of assimilation which results in strength, health, growth. 

It will usually be found, too, that studies thus chosen are 
most directly preparatory to one's probable calling in life. For 
the desire which determines the choice of studies also determines 
the choice of a vocation. President Eliot writes of his son, 
Charles : 

"He arrived at the end of his Senior year without having 
any distinct vision of the profession which awaited him, neither 
he nor his father having perceived his special gifts. Neverthe- 
less, it turned out, after he had settled with joy on liis profession, 
that, if he had known at the beginning of his Sophomore year 
what his profession was to be, he could not have selected his 
studies better than he did with only the guidance of his hkings 
and natural interests. He took during his last three years 
in college all the courses in fine arts which were open to him ; 
he subsequently found his French and German indispensable 
for wide reading in the best literature of his profession; his 
studies in science supplied both training and information appro- 
XXVI [ 9 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

priate to his calling; ana history and political economy were 
useful to him as culture studies and for their social bearings." * 

The college course which Charles Eliot took w^ on the whole 
a broad and a broadening one. It was not so broad that it be- 
came thin or a means of intellectual dissipation. The broad 
course is always in peril of becoming a little thin and the narrow 
course of becoming narrowing. A course can safely to a degree 
become narrow in case a man knows the channel in which his 
life is to flow. But most men do not so know. " I am to-day 
thirty years old, I graduate as a mechanical engineer. I now 
know I do not want to be a mechanical engineer. I want to be 
a lawyer." So said a student on the Commencement Day of 
his scientific school. Ignorance of one's abilities or desires 
or opportunities should lead one to a broad course of study 
in the college. Even many of the great manufacturing corpo- 
rations prefer the liberally to the technically trained graduate. 
Said a member of a great corporation which builds steel mills 
round the world: 

" The man of liberal education is, on the whole, worth more 
to us than the man of technical training. He is worth less for a 
year or two after coming to us, but he has a power for learning 
all branches of our business which is specially needed." 

The peril of overeducation, for those who are to enter busi- 
ness, is a peril in the existence of which I find not a few "captains 
of industry" believe. By overeducation is meant an education 
of the intellect which fits the individual to do a higher work 
than is actually open to him, or a higher work than his other 
faculties fit him to do. The point at which this danger touches 
the college relates to the equilibrium of personal forces. The 
college may draw too heavily on the intellectual resources of 
the individual. Strength, which in the course of his college 
career he should have given to the will, the conscience, the heart, 
the body, may have been given to the intellect. As a result, the 
graduate may come forth from the college halls bearing a mind 
disciplined to think, but lacking the power of body or of will 
to use this disciplined mind. He is like an engine, perfect 
in every part, but without sufficient steam. Mr. S. R. Callaway, 

1 " Charles Eliot: Landscape Architect," pp. 28, 29. 
XXVI [ TO ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

formerly President of the New York Central Railroad, writes 
me that a friend of the late Commodore Vanderbilt bore to 
him from Lord Palmerston a message that it vv'as "a pity a 
man with so much talent had not the advantages which educa- 
tion gives." "You tell Lord Palmerston from me," said the 
Commodore, "that if I had learned education I would not 
have had time to learn anything else." It is a story beneath 
the humor of which, says Mr. Callaway, "lies more or less 
of reality." The peril of the overeducation of the intellect 
is simply the peril of the undereducation of the will, of the 
conscience, of the heart, of the body. This peril is to be 
avoided not so much by lessening the education of the in- 
tellect as by increasing the education of the body, the heart, 
conscience and will. The members of the British cabinets 
of the last twenty-five years illustrate the advantage of a well- 
proportioned education. All have been, with hardly an ex- 
ception, graduates of either Oxford or Cambridge; not a few 
have been honor men. One never forgets Gladstone with his 
double first-class. But besides whatever intellectual power 
they possessed, they have been men of great strength of body 
and of distinct force of will. Unique strength of character 
has not segregated them from their fellows. They have been 
at once commanders and servants, men and gentlemen, golf- 
players and thinkers. 

Business of every sort requires men of power: power of intel- 
lect, to think; of will, to do; of conscience, to right; of heart, 
to appreciate, of body, to begin and to endure. Some men pos- 
sess these manifold powers more largely without a liberal educa- 
tion than other men with a liberal education. But the purpose 
of the college is not to make men equal, but to develop each to 
his utmost capacity of development. As a rule, both the ablest 
men and the men not ablest by nature would become still more 
able by reason of a liberal education. This is the meaning, I 
take it, of Prof. Elihu Thompson, who writes saying- 

"The boy who does not go to college enters business life 
earlier, gets an early start, and perhaps loses less of the power 
of adaptation to his surroundings. The older a man is, the less 
pliable he becomes ; but men differ very widely in this particu- 

XXVI [ 1 1 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

lar — some crystallize very early, others only in advanced age. 
Nevertheless, I do think that in the great majority of cases what- 
ever disadvantage is at first suffered is more than made up in the 
end. I can see no reason why higher education should prevent 
or lessen success in business affairs, which success depends upon 
good judgment and energy. In manufacturing, and 1 think 
to an increasing extent in most business undertakings, a train- 
ing which leans toward the scientific and technical will, I believe, 
be of the greatest value. This involves mathematical proficiency 
in greater or less degree; not mathematics as an abstraction, 
but in relation to the concrete realities." 

And another says: 

"If a young man forms no bad habits during his college 
course, he can well afford to invest four years' time in return 
for the college friendships, and, more especially, the taste for 
reading, for study, and the higher and better things of life; and 
if he accomplishes no more than acquiring such tastes, his 
time will be well spent in the pleasure and satisfaction that he 
will receive throughout his life, and in his ability, when he is 
able to do so, to retire from active business, without feeling 
that he can enjoy nothing but business. A young man of 
ability, strong, tactful, determined to succeed, will succeed, 
with or without a college education; and if he has to work his 
own way through college so much the better for him, for he starts 
with a distinct advantage over his fellow-students. Such a 
young man as I have described will soon overtake those that 
started in business four vears before he did, and his mental 
training should give him a marked advantage over those that 
have not received it." 

This question of the value of a college training to the man 
entering business I have discussed simply on the narrow basis of 
the commercial service. Of course there is another basis, and 
one which some would call more important. One of my corre- 
spondents speaks of a college course as fitting one "to better 
discern and like all that is noble and beautiful in life"; and 
another- " College education ought to make him a more reason- 
able man, and to increase his capacity for enjoyment through- 
out life." These are values in themselves; and, if one were 

XXVI [ 12 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

inclined to urge the point, one could show that these values 
have also commercial worth. 

One also may be allowed to say that if civilization is to ad- 
vance it is to advance not through the selfward tendency of 
the individual and of individual effort, be that tendency either 
material or intellectual or ethical, but also through altruistic 
movements. One likes to quote Burke's words: "Society is 
a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a part- 
nership in every virtue and in all perfection." It is a partner- 
ship including generations yet unborn. As one reflects on the 
condition of the present age, as one reflects on the life of the 
future centuries, one realizes that the higher life of the whole 
race has claims upon those v/ho live in the first decade of the 
twentieth century. That chief claim is to make large men. 

This discussion is made forceful by liberal extracts from the 
few of the many letters written to me by the heads of great 
business corporations touching the value of a college training. 
The first which I submit is from Mr. Hugh J. Chisholm, 
President of the International Paper Company: 

"I regard a man equipped with a college education, two 
years' technical and two years' law-school training, as the best- 
equipped material to build upon, if he is entering into and 
expecting to follow a manufacturing, mercantile, or banking 
business; and, after a man trained in this way gets the practical 
knowledge of the business in which he engages, he has a better 
combination of qualities than the man possessing knowledge 
accjuired from practical encountering or conducting of any 
of the above referred to lines of business, whose education is 
confined to that which he has received from the high school. 
The very serious objection, however, to acquiring such a college 
education as outlined above, is the time it consumes, assuming 
that it takes from four to six years as the shortest time possible 
to so equip a young man. The boy who leaves the high school 
and commences at once from that point to get practical knowl- 
edge of the business or commercial life has certainly an ad- 
vantage later in life when he encounters the college graduate 
who is just commencing his business career, and by the lack 
of this practical technical knowledge the college graduate is 
XXVI [ 13 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

handicapped when brought in competition with the young 
man who has devoted his time to the learning of the business 
into which he may have entered. But, assuming that they 
both possess equal mental and physical ability, in the four or 
six years following, the college graduate ought to excel the young 
man whose education has been confined to the high school. 
In my judgment, the college presidents of the present day 
have no more serious problem to intelligently and practically 
w'.rk out than that of properly establishing a course of studies 
in the great colleges of this countiy which will take into consid- 
eration how best to educate and equip that portion of their stu- 
dents who intend to follow a commercial calling rather than 
a profession, realizing, as every thinking man does to-day, the 
great demand that has been created for the highest type of 
intellectual ability, integrity, and executive ability, necessary 
to manage successfully and honestly the great amount of capi- 
tal that has been and is being concentrated in the large industrial 
corporations of this countiy." 

John W. Dunn, President of the International Steam Pump 
Company, says: 

"Although I did not myself enjoy the benefits of a college 
education, having left school at an early age to go to work for 
my living, I do not share the prejudice against a college educa- 
tion which is expressed by some of our self-made men. I 
believe that the theoretical foundation which a young man re- 
ceives at a well-conducted college can be of great use to him 
in after life, provided that on leaving college he is willing to 
begin at the bottom of the ladder to learn practically any busi- 
ness he may choose to enter upon, without bringing with him 
any false idea that the learning that he has acquired from his 
books and his professors absolves him from going through 
precisely the same course of practical training that he would 
have had to undergo if he had gone directly from school or high 
school to a shop or factory. We have in our various companies 
a number of young men W'ho are graduates of the various tech- 
nical institutes, and whom we are walling to assist in making 
their way, provided they are content to begin as common 
operatives, like any ordinary working-man who is to earn his 
XXVI [ 14 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

living. To any young man who is content to take up his work 
in this frame of mind, I believe that a professional education 
will be of great value after he has thoroughly mastered the prac- 
tical details of his work, and familiarized himself with those 
matters which can only be acquired by actual experience 
and by actual contact with business and with men. Any young 
man, however, who is imbued wdth a belief that because he 
has gone through college he has nothing further to learn, and 
is superior to the necessities which those who have had no such 
advantages are compelled to recognize, will find that his college 
education is not only of no benefit to him, but is a positive 
hindrance to his success in life. My observation of young men, 
in whom I have always taken a great deal of interest, has led me 
to believe that the main reason why so many college men are 
not as successful in business as others who have only had the 
very plainest rudiments of an education is that by reason of 
the species of conceit to which I have just referred their minds 
are closed to those sources of instruction and training which 
they would otherwise gladly avail themselves of, and to which 
the success of most of our self-made men is in a considerable 
measure due. I believe that all of our best colleges recognize 
the truth of what I have just said, and take pains to instil 
it into the minds of their students. That is to say, they im- 
press upon them that when they leave college they have not learn- 
ed everything there is to know, but are only on the threshold, 
and that the advantages they have had over other men will not 
avail them unless they apply themselves to their business 
with the same energy, fidelity, and perseverance that those 
other men habitually employ." 

Mr. J. Ogden Armour, of Chicago, through his secretary 
states : 

"That in his opinion, the solution of this question, as far 
as commercial success is concerned, is not so much one of the 
abstract value of advanced education, as compared with that 
obtained in the public schools, as it is of adaptability to the 
chosen pursuit of the student. He, of course, recognizes the 
very great value of a complete education, but he thinks it is 
to be largely measured, in relation to success in commercial 
XXVI [ 15 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

affairs, by the tmstworthi^pp, ambition, and perseverance 
that accompany it. With These fundamental qualifications, 
and others which naturally suggest them.selves, opportunities 
for a successful career would unquestionably occur. Mr. 
Armour's action regarding employees in his own business is 
practically wholly independent of the possession by them of ex- 
ceptional educational advantages. He does not, however, desire 
to underrate the desirability of the highest education possible, 
but thinks that commercial success is chiefly dependent upon 
qualifications which may or may not accompany exceptional 
scholastic attainment." 

Mr. Wyerhaeuser, of Wyerhaeuser & Company, of St. 
Paul, writes: 

"The disadvantages under which a college graduate labors 
when he enters business are that he is pretty well advanced 
toward manhood, is awkward, has no business training, and 
is apt to think that because he is a college graduate he ought 
not to be obliged to commence at the bottom of the ladder and 
work up, as the office boy does who enters the office when he 
is fourteen years of age. If he is a man of good sense and 
does not think too much of his college education, by the time 
he is forty years of age he has a great many advantages over 
the boy who left school at eighteen, and it must be a source of 
great satisfaction to him during his life that he has had the 
benefit of a college education. I, by all means, would recom- 
mend to a boy, who is inclined to study, a course in some good 
college. He certainly, in the course of time, will find that he 
is amply repaid for it. The boy who is bright and starts in 
business after graduating from the high school will, for the 
first ten years, get along much better and be happier than the 
man who has spent four or five years attending college, and 
may have made a good start toward laying the foundation for 
a profitable business long before the college man gets an insight 
into the business. Still, I think the college graduate, by the 
time he reaches seventy, would have had the most satisfactory 
life, and, perhaps, would be fully as successful as the man 
who has not been fortunate enough to possess a college edu- 
cation." 

XXVI [ i6 ] 



THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 

Mr. Powell Stackhousc, of the Cambria Steel Company, 
says: 

"I hold that a young man of proper physical and mental 
balance cannot be overeducated. In the manufacture of steel 
(and the same is true of any modern manufacturing operations) 
a thorough technical education is an essential, as without it 
a limit of advancement will sooner or later be reached. In 
the commercial line it may not be so essential, but is a great 
advantage. It is true that there are many notable men who, 
without the advantages of a technical education, have risen to 
the top of their profession; these are the exceptions in many 
thousands, and are only such as have the natural ability, coupled 
with great perseverance and the self-denial afterward to edu- 
cate themselves, and they cannot be raised as objections, but 
as an incentive to a thorough college education. It does not 
follow by any means that because a young man has passed a 
college life with credit, he will necessarily be a success in any 
line he may select. He has only been furnished with the mental 
tools to work with, and their after application depends upon 
his use and the opportunities thereby afforded. Any failure 
of a young man to secure the most advanced education he 
possibly can must in some time of his future life operate det- 
rimentally." 

Such testimonies I might call to great number and length. 
But enough has been said to prove that the managers of the 
great business undertakings of the present and of the future 
will receive large advantage from the college. To the merchant, 
the manufacturer, and the administrator the college offers an 
understanding more comprehensive, a sense of relationship 
more just, as well as a training of the will more adequate for 
large undertakings. The college helps to create the man of 
sobermindedness, of personal resolution, who is intent on things 
of the mind. It aids, let us believe, in nourishing the noblest 
type of the gentleman. But, while causing these richest per- 
sonal results, it is also training great executives for the great 
affairs of the United States and of the world. 



XXVI [17] 



XXVII 



SPORT 

"THE MISSION OF SPORT AND OUTDOOR LIFE" 

BY 

GROVER CLEVELAND 

FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 



/^NLY recently has the importance of sport been admitted 
in our philosophy of life. The old tendency was to 
regard outdoor exercise as a thing of childhood, to be put aside 
with other childish toys. Noiu, hoivcver, the need of recreation^ 
of refreshment from the overmastering strain of modern effort^ 
becomes increasingly apparent. Youth may easily be too ready 
to give itself, to expend its forces. It does not count the cost. 
Hence, in timely warning to young men, comes the following 
address from one whose devotion to outdoor sports still keeps 
him young at seventy. This discussion was first published 
by Mr. Cleveland in The Country Calendar, now Country Life 
in America, and is here reprinted by permission. 

Our former President's own preference among sports is well 
known to be for fishing, but he is broad-minded enough to speak 
with equal enthusiasm of every form of exercise. Whatever 
brings a man outside himself and his oWn petty worries, what- 
ever urges him to take a full deep breath of country air, that is 
so ■ much capital to him ; it enhances his powers mentally and 
morally as well as physically. 

I AM sure that it is not necessary for me, at this late day, to 
dwell upon the fact that I am an enthusiast in my devotion to 
hunting and fishing, as well as every other kind of outdoor recrea- 
tion. I am so proud of this devotion that, if my sporting 
proclivities have at times subjected me to criticism and petty 

XXVII [ I ] 



SPORT 

forms of persecution, I cIo not harbor the shadow of a desire 
that my steadfastness shall be looked upon as manifesting the 
courage of martyrdom. On the contrary, I regard these criti- 
cisms and persecutions as nothing more serious than gnat 
stings suffered on the bank of a stream — vexations to be borne 
with patience and afterward easily submerged in the memory 
of abundant delightful accompaniments. Thus, when short 
fishing excursions, in which I have sought relief from the 
killing vexations and perplexities of official duty, have been de- 
nounced in a mendacious newspaper as dishonest devices to 
cover scandalous revelry, I have been able to enjoy a sort of 
pleasurable contempt for the author of this accusation, while 
congratulating myself on the mental and physical restoration 
I had derived from these excursions. So, also, when people 
more mistaken than malicious have wagged their heads in pity- 
ing fashion and deprecated my guiltiness of hunting and fish- 
ing frivolity in high public service, I have found it easy to lament 
the neglect of these amiable persons to accumulate for their 
delectation a fund of charming reminiscences of sport; while, 
at the same time, I have sadly reflected how their dispositions 
might have been sweetened and their lives made happier if 
they had yielded something to the particular type of frivolity 
which they deplored. 

I hope it may not be amiss for me to supplement these person- 
al observations by the direct confession that, so far as my attach- 
ment to outdoor sports may be considered as a fault, I am, as 
related to this especial predicament of guilt, utterly incorrigible 
and shameless. Not many years ago, while residing in a non- 
sporting but delightfully cultured and refined community, I 
found that considerable indignation had been aroused among 
certain good neighbors and friends, because it had been said 
of me that I was willing to associate in the field with any loafer 
who was the owner of a dog and gun. I. am sure that I did 
not in the least undervalue the extreme friendliness of those 
inclined to intervene in my defence ; and yet, at the risk of doing 
an apparently ungracious thing, I felt inexorably constrained 
to check their kindly eft'orts by promptly conceding that the 
charge was too nearly true to be denied. 
xxvn [ 2 ] 



SPORT 

There can be no doubt that certain men are endowed with 
a sort of inherent and spontaneous instinct which leads them 
to hunting and fishing indulgence as the most alluring and 
satisfying of all recreations. In this view, I believe it may 
be safely said that the true hunter or fisherman is born, not made. 
I believe, too, that those who thus by instinct and birthright 
belong to the sporting fraternity and are actuated by a genuine 
sporting spirit, are neither cruel, nor greedy and wasteful of 
the game and fish they pursue; and I am convinced that there 
can be no better conservators of the sensible and provident 
protection of game and fish than those who are enthusiastic 
in their pursuit, but who, at the same time, are regulated and 
restrained by a sort of chivalric fairness and generosity, felt and 
recognized by every true sportsman. 

While it is most agreeable thus to consider hunting and fish- 
ing as constituting, for those especially endowed for their enjoy- 
ment, the most tempting of outdoor sports, it is easily apparent 
that there is a practical value to these sports as well as all other 
outdoor recreations, which rests upon a broader foundation. 
Though the delightful and passionate love for outdoor sports and 
recreation is not bestowed upon every one as a natural gift, they 
are so palpably related to health and vigor, and so inseparably 
connected with the work of life and comfort of existence, that 
it is happily ordained that a desire or a willingness for their 
enjoyment may be cultivated to an extent sufficient to meet 
the requirements of health and self-care. In other words, all 
but the absolutely indifferent can be made to realize that outdoor 
air and activity, intimacy with nature and acquaintanceship with 
birds and animals and fish, are essential to physical and mental 
strength, under the exactions of an unescapable decree. 

' For the good God who loveth us 
He made and loveth all." 

Men may accumulate wealth in neglect of this law; but how 
infinitely much they will forfeit, in the deprivation of wholesome 
vigor, in the loss of the placid fitness for the quiet joys and com- 
forts of advancing years, and in the displacement of contented 
age by the demon of querulous and premature decrepitude! 
XXVII [ 3 ] 



SPORT 



A LAW NOT TO BE DISOBEYED 



Men in disobedience of this law may achieve triumph in the 
world of science, education, and art ; but how unsatisfying are 
the rewards thus gained if they hasten the night when no man 
can work, and if the later hours of life are haunted by futile 
regrets for what is still left undone, that might have been done 
if there had been closer communion with nature's visible forms! 

In addition to the delight which outdoor recreations afford 
to those instinctively in harmony with their enjoyment, and after 
a recognition of the fact that a knowledge of their nerve and 
muscle-saving ministrations may be sensibly cultivated, there 
still remains another large, item that should be placed to their 
credit. Every individual, as a unit in the scheme of civiUzed 
social life, owes to every man, woman, and child within such 
relationship an uninterrupted contribution to the fund of en- 
livening and pleasurable social intercourse. None of us can 
deny this obligation; and none of us can discharge it as we 
ought, if our contributions are made in the questionable coin 
of sordidness and nature's perversion. Our experience and 
observation supply abundant proof that those who contribute 
most generously to the exhilaration and charm of social inter- 
course will be found afnong the disciples of outdoor recreation, 
who are in touch with nature and have thus kept fresh and 
unperverted a simple love of humanity. 

A CHANCE IN THE OPEN FOR ALL 

It seems to me that thoughtful men should not be accused 
of exaggerated fears when they deprecate the wealth-mad 
rush and struggle of American life and the consequent neglect 
of outdoor recreation, which impair that mental and physical 
vigor absolutely essential to our national welfare, abundantly 
promised to those who gratefully recognize, in nature's ad- 
justment to the wants of man, the care of "the good God" 
who "made and loveth all." 

Manifestly, if outdoor recreations are important to the 
individual and to the nation, and if there is danger of their 
XXVII [ 4 ] 



SPORT 

neglect, every instrumentality should be heartily encouraged 
which aims to create and stimulate their indulgence in every 
form. 

Fortunately, the field is broad and furnishes a choice for 
all except those wilfully at fault. The sky and sun above the 
head, the soil beneath the feet, and outdoor air on every side 
are the indispensable requisites. 



xxvn [ 5 ] 



XXVIII 



THE TOILERS 

"LABOR ORGANIZATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES" 

BY 

CARROLL D. WRIGHT. 

PRESIDENT OF CLARK COLLEGE 



CTHE HON. CARROLL D. WRIGHT, who since 1902 
has been president oj the newly founded Clark College in 
Worcester, Mass., held for nearly twenty years previously the 
high and arduous office of Labor Commissioner to the United 
States. Hence no other man could be so well fitted to tell us 
from an impartial standpoint what are the position and the pros- 
pects of the laborer in Ainerica. 

This is obviously one of the important problems of to-day 
and of the future. Of recent years labor has begun to reassert 
its ancient dignity. Not only in America but throughout Europe 
tlie system of labor organization has given the luorkingman 
such power that a future begins to seem possible in which his 
efforts will be required not to assert his own rights but only to 
restrain himself from trampling on those of others. Some keen 
eyes, Jurwever, begin to see, or believe they see, a coming ameliora- 
tion of conditions, a practically working harmony between labor 
and capital, which shall recognize the rights of both. It is in 
this effort to understand the future of labor by the light of its re- 
cent developments that President Wright here lends us his aid. 

There is little or no evidence of the existence of the modern 
trade union, so far as recorded facts are concerned, prior to 
the year 1 700. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
the principles of trade unionism developed in Great Britain 
until at the present time the unions are strong, numerous, well- 
equipped with funds, and generally recognized as important 
xxvm [ I ] 



THE TOILERS 

elements in industrial dc^fcpmcnt. It is rare now to meet 
an employer in the old country who does not in some degree 
approve of organized labor. He may deprecate particular 
methods and insist that organizations encroach upon the rights 
and responsibilities of employers; but the underlying principle 
of labor organization is recognized. 

A trade union is understood to be an association of wage 
earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the condi- 
tions of their employment, and it is this form and for this pur- 
pose that the union has existed in England for at least two cen- 
turies. It did not spring full-grown into existence, but grew as 
industry developed. This has been the course, too, in the United 
States, although the development has not extended over such a 
range of time. Prior to the establishment of the factory system 
in the United States there was little labor organization. The 
factory system was not the cause of organization in England, 
nor was it particularly the cause of it in the United States ; but 
with the factory system industry itself became more thoroughly 
organized, and by the concentration of workers helped largely 
to create the desire for their organization. 

The Southern colonies, where the slave system existed prior 
to the Civil War, did not offer any fertile field for wage earners 
to agitate the question of organization. The Northern colonies, 
although having a different system of labor from the South, 
also offered but little field for labor agitation prior to the estab- 
lishment of the factory system, because industry was primitive 
in its nature, land was plentiful, laborers were in demand, and 
habits and wants were simple. The two systems of labor, 
slave and free, naturally had their effect in various directions, 
both in the economics of production and in the relation of the 
laborer to society. As mechanical industries developed, free 
labor offered opportunities for movement; yet historically there 
is not revealed any concerted action of any consequence during 
the colonial period, except incidentally in the early days in 
Massachusetts, when the ship caulkers, who were politicians, 
organized what was known as the "Caulkers' Club," and it is 
from this name that the American term "caucus" was derived. 
This club existed in the early part of the eighteenth century, 

XXVIII [ 2 ] 



THE TOILERS 

but in those days the elements of organization were wanting, 
for organization comes through the aggregation of laborers 
in industrial centres. 

The domestic system of labor also stood in the way of ex- 
tensive organization. Thus it was not until the opening of the 
nineteenth century that labor unions began to have any in- 
fluence in industrial affairs, and their influence was very slight 
until after the first quarter of that centuiy had passed. In 
1806 the Tailors' Union was established, partly for trade pur- 
poses but largely on account of political interests, as the taUors 
had always been participants in political matters. Tliis asso- 
ciation grew from the influence exerted by members of the craft 
coming from England, who preserved their loyalty to the Journey- 
men Tailors' Unions of the old country. The hatters had an 
organization in 1819, and the shipwrights and caulkers estab- 
lished an order in 1822, under the name of the "Columbian 
Charitable Society of Shipwrights and Caulkers of Boston and 
Charlestown." This organization was chartered by the legis- 
lature of Massachusetts in 1823. An association called the 
"New York Society of Journeymen Shipwrights" was incorpo- 
rated in the city of New York in 1803, while the house carpen- 
ters of the same city organized in 1806. It is probable that the 
compositors of New York were organized in the earliest years 
of the last century, for in 181 7 they had a society kno^vn as 
the "New York Typographical Society," with Peter Force 
as its president. 

With the year 1825, on account of new elements and purposes 
which appeared at that time, the development of the labor 
movement took on new force. No single cause for the spirit 
of that year can be assigned. There were many reasons for it, 
among which were the demand for shorter hours of labor and 
for higher wages, a desire to experiment in co-operation, and 
the spirit of association, which rapidly developed through the 
influence of the altruistic preachings of Robert Owen, who 
came to America in 1824. A wave of socialistic doctrines, 
which may well be called the transcendentalism of industr}', 
swept over the country. Fourier and others helped to feed 
this spirit, and veiy many socialist experiments were inaugu- 
XXVIII [ 3 ] 



THE TOILERS 

rated, more than two liig^rcd communistic villages having 
been founded as the result of the doctrines taught by Charles 
Fourier. So the period from 1825 to 1850 may be called a 
period of reform movements, all having more or less influ- 
ence on the spirit of organization, which spirit extended to the 
wage earners. 

The rapidly developing factory system, the very essence of 
which is the principle of association, added economic force to 
the general reform movements, and after 1825 unions began to 
be formed everywhere in the Northern States, accompanied 
by an agitation for legislation for workingmen, Boston and 
New York being the most prominent centres of all the move- 
ments. Naturally, labor literature appeared, and in 1825 the 
Working Man's Advocate was published in the city of New 
York. This publication was followed by the Daily Sentinel 
and Young America, all published by two Englishmen, George 
Henry Evans and Frederick W. Evans, who came to America 
in 1820. 

In 1830 a workingmen's convention was held at Syracuse, 
in the State of New York, which convention put up a candidate 
for Governor. The next year the movers, under the name of 
the "Working Men's Party," united with the Whigs, and 
succeeded in electing three or four members of the legislature. 
An important convention was held in Boston on the i6th of 
February, 1831, consisting of farmers, mechanics, and other 
workingmen. Out of this meeting grew a delegate convention, 
held in 1832, in September. This convention discussed land 
interests, taxation, and co-operative trading. Many of its 
demands were similar to those advanced by the Evans brothers. 
The Hon. Edward Everett, afterward Minister to the Court 
of St. James's, commended the organization of the Working 
Men's Party as represented in the convention of Boston. Other 
meetings were held in that city, at which it was recommended 
that the mechanics of all branches should hold meetings by 
themselves for the purpose of consulting together and of doing 
all possible things to enable them to come to a mutual agreement 
upon the system of working hours. The right of laborers to 
organize for the purpose of securing and protecting their interests 
xxviii [ 4 ] 



THE TOILERS 

and the question as to whether general trade unions would di- 
minish strikes and lock-outs were also prominent in all the dis- 
cussions. Following these meetings in the city of Boston in 
the years 1831 and 1832, the General Trades Unions of the 
City of New York were active in discussing the same questions, 
and this is the first attempt, so far as the history of the develop- 
ment of industry is concerned, to unite workingmcn of different 
trades in one organization. In later years this attempt was 
repeated by the Knights of Labor. 

The agitation for organization during the years following 
those just named took various forms, and in some cases the 
employers took part in the matter from their point of view. 
At a meeting held in the Exchange Coffee Rooms on the 15th 
of May, 1832, the merchants and shipowners voted to "dis- 
countenance and check the unlawful combination formed to 
control the freedom of individuals as to the hours of labor, 
and to thwart and embarrass those by whom they are employed 
and liberally paid." The meeting also pointed out what it 
considered to be "the pernicious and demoralizing tendency 
of these combinations and the unreasonableness of the attempt, 
in particular where mechanics are held in so high estimation 
and their skill in labor so liberally rewarded." The capitalists 
and other employers in their assembly at that time held that 
labor ought always to be left free to regulate itself, and that 
neither the employee nor the employer should have the power 
to control the other, and they looked with deep regret upon any 
course designed to coerce individuals and to prescribe the time 
and manner of labor. The employers announced that labor 
organizations would drive trade from the city, and they passed 
a resolution pledging themselves to "neither employ any 
journeyman who at the time belongs to such combinations, 
nor give work to any master mechanic who shall employ them 
while they continue thus pledged to each other." In this 
resolution 106 firms joined. 

From this statement it will be seen that seventy-five years ago 

there was as much opposition to the organization of labor in 

America as existed in the old country, but as the country' grew 

accustomed to labor organizations it learned to consider them 

XXVIII [ 5 ] 



THE TOILERS 

as helpful in many ways, 30^ that they were not antagonistic 
to proper development. The American people, like the English, 
realized that trade unionism represented a struggle for im- 
provement, and that it ought not to be subjected to legal dis- 
abilities, nor considered with suspicion, nor brought under 
harsh investigation, nor subjected to persecution. A larger 
knowledge, a wider sympathy, caused the American people to 
realize that, in spite of antagonism, disabilities, and suspicion, 
the most intelligent and industrious artisans of the country 
were making great efforts to aid in the upward struggle, and to 
enable the workmen to 'meet the great exigencies resulting 
from sickness, accident, old age, disability, irregularity of em- 
ployment, death, and the destitution of widows and orphans. 
Hostility ceased in a great measure. The courts became 
more friendly, and instead of declaring all organizations to be 
conspiracies, as was the habit in the earlier part of the century, 
they gradually took the ground that organizations were legiti- 
mate, and that the efforts to secure increased remuneration 
were not efforts to restrain trade ; and the unions were therefore 
able, after a somewhat tedious contest covering more than a 
quarter of a century, to throw off legal disabilities and take 
their place among modern institutions as a recognized force 
in the public welfare, and there they remain. 

The general understanding at the present time is that com- 
binations, either of labor or of capital as such, are not essentially 
objects of distrust, evils to be throttled, or diseases to be eradi- 
cated from the economic system, and with this understanding 
comes the recognition of the truth that unregulated competition 
is the law of death and not of life; that it means everywhere 
the survival of the unfit — the unfit employer as well as the unfit 
employee, and the unfit type of industrial organization, whether 
of employees or employers. The people are learning that com- 
bination is the inevitable, result of efforts to escape suicidal 
conditions of unregulated competition of all forms, whether it 
be the destructive competition of producers fighting each other 
in the dark for custom, or the hungry competition of workmen 
fighting each other in the dark for the custom of employers — 
the opportunity to earn a proper remuneration. 
xxvin [ 6 ] 



THE TOILERS 

This brief historical view of labor organization in the United 
States shows that it constitutes an integral part of our industrial 
development and is really an influential feature of industrial 
achievement. Since 1825 the history of trade unionism is a 
progressive one. Out of the earlier combinations there have 
grown some great associations or organizations, developing 
power and bringing to the attention of the country conditions 
which need reform and relations which call for the highest 
ethical influence to secure their proper adjustment; and it is 
sufficient in this place to say that, no matter what the opposition 
of any particular period was or the character it assumed, no 
matter what antagonisms within disturbed the order of develop- 
ment, no matter how defections reduced the ranks of union- 
ism at times, and jealousies prevented success, labor organiza- 
tions have continued through success and failure, and their 
propaganda have extended first to all great interests and ulti- 
mately to all parts of the land. 

Among trade unionists there are three types of unions 
recognized — the local, the national, and the international. The 
typical local union is made up entirely of members who live and 
work in one town or one restricted locality, and its business 
is conducted in the democratic way, by a vote of all the members 
meeting in one place. The national and international unions 
really constitute but a single type, though the formal distinction 
between them i carefully preserved in all trade-union literature. 
The typical national union aims at bringing under one control 
the workers in its trade in the United States, while the inter- 
national union, so called, draws into its constituency the local 
unions of the United States, Canada, and sometimes Mexico. 
Local unions are the constituent elements of national and inter- 
national unions, and the voting is done by delegates. Most 
of the national trade unions are affiliated to one great federal 
organization, known as the American Federation of Labor. 
The railway brotherhoods, so called, keep their separate or- 
ganizations without affiliating to any other body. There are 
some independent unions, while the Knights of Labor are a 
body entirely distinct from all other organizations and have 
a different organic law. 

XXVIII [ 7 ] 



THE TOILERS 

It Is difficult to ascerta^T the membership of unions. In 
Great Britain the law requiring registration enables the Govern- 
ment to state with fair accuracy the strength of unions in that 
country. According to the latest reports available, the English 
trade unions had a membership of 1,802,518, while in the 
United States, with double England's population, the estimated 
membership of labor organizations on July ist last was 1,400,000. 
It is estimated at the present time that there are nearly 18,000,000 
persons (men, women, and children) in the United States 
working as wage earners. The percentage embraced in the 
labor unions is not large, therefore, being not more than 8 per 
cent, of the w^hole body. It must be remcml)ercd, however, 
that in many trades the members are organized up to a large 
proportion, sometimes 90 per cent, of the total number engaged. 

The American Federation of Labor probably represents 
at the present time 850,000 members, while it is claimed that 
the Knights of Labor have a membership of nearly 200,000. 
Some years ago this latter organization numbered nearly 1,000,- 
000. The Order of Railway Conductors of America has nearly 
25,000 members, the Brotherhod of Locomotive Engineers 
over 34,000, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen nearly 
38,000, the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen about 44,000, 
while the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the Switchmen's 
Union of North America, the Order of Railroad Telegraphers, 
and the Brotherhood of Railway Trackmen, whose member- 
ship has not been recently reported, all constitute influential 
organizations. All these organizations, with some independent 
bodies, make up the total stated— about 1,400,000. 

The objects of most trade unions are well represented in 
the declaration of the Federation of Labor, which demands 
eight hours as a day's work, favors the national and state in- 
corporation of unions, urges the obligatory education of children 
and the prohibition of employment under the age of 14, calls 
for the enactment of uniform franchise laws, and opposes 
contract convict labor and the truck system of payment of 
wages. If favors the adoption of employers' liability acts, and 
generally indorses the claims of trade unionism everywhere. 

Trade unionism represents the interests of specific trades. 
XXVIII [ 8 ] 



THE TOILERS 

The principles underlying the tenets of the Knights of Labor 
ignore specific vocations and seek to harmonize all individual 
or separate interests in the interests of the whole, the declared 
aim of the order being to secure to the workers of society the 
fullest enjoyment of the wealth they are supposed to create and 
leisure for the development of intellectual, moral, and social 
faculties. Many of the tenets of the Knights of Labor are 
similar to those of trade unionism, and they demand the in- 
corporation of labor organizations, as do the unionists. All 
orders in America favor industrial arbitration and are practically 
opposed to compulsory arbitration. 

The Order of the Knights of Labor is more socialistic than 
the American Federation of Labor, but both have made some 
declaration in the direction of government ownership. For 
many years there has been a contest for control by the socialistic 
members of the latter body, but so far the Federation has been 
conservative, and with one exception has resisted successfully 
all attempts to make a socialistic organization of it. 

Some of the large unions have funds of considerable amount. 
One of the best representative orders in this respect is the 
Cigar-makers' International Union, with a membership of 
nearly 34,000. During twenty-one years this order paid in 
benefits $4,737,550. 

The objects of all organizations are peaceful and moral 
and do not invite antagonism, but when it comes to action, then 
men differ not only as to the value of the work of organized 
labor but as to the legitimacy of its purpose. As a rule, trade 
unions are opposed to strikes, and they declare themselves not 
in sympathy with the strike method of enforcing demands. 
They, of course, insist upon the right to strike, and the courts 
sustain this right. It is the almost universal attitude of courts 
in the United States that if one man can leave his employment, 
two or more may do so, and that there can be no restriction 
upon this privilege. The courts hold, however, as they do in 
England, that intimidation and violence must not accompany 
strikes, and that the strikers themselves, in indulging in these 
things, are amenable to criminal law. Strikes are no longer 
considered as conspiracies, however. 
XXVIII [ 9 ] 



THE TOILERS 

During the twenty yrars closing December 31, 1900, 
there had occurred in the United States 22,793 strikes, involving 
117,509 establishments. Of these strikes, 50.77 per cent, 
succeeded, 13.04 per cent, succeeded partly, and 36.19 per cent, 
failed. Labor organizations ordered 14,457, ^^ ^3 P^^ cent, of 
all the strikes occurring during the period, and of those ordered 
by organizations 52.86 per cent, succeeded, 13.60 per cent, 
partially succeeded, and 33.54 per cent., or about one-third of 
all the strikes ordered by organizations, failed. From these 
data is seen the practical influence of labor organizations in 
their attitude toward strikes. 

To-day the most prominent leaders of all labor organizations 
are joining hands with broad-minded employers everywhere in 
efforts to adopt the joint-committee method of settling disputes. 
They are learning from the experience of the mother country 
that it is better to have such joint conciliation committees, 
before whom all grievances can be laid as soon as they arise and 
by whom they can be talked over in a friendly but interested 
Way. Our most intelligent captains of industry are thoroughly 
alive to this view, and in connection with organized labor 
they have a grand opportunity to accomplish results that shall 
be beneficial to themselves and to the community. 

Probably these efforts will be facilitated through the in- 
corporation of trade unions. There is nothing in the laws of 
any of the States of the Union that prevents such incorporation ; 
nevertheless but few organizations have taken advantage of the 
laws allowing incorporation. In the State of New York there 
are a few incorporated unions, but as a rule unionists are fear- 
ful of the results of incorporation. They fear that their funds 
may be attached whenever members of a union commit overt 
acts and thus subject them to suits for damages, and that 
whenever a decree of a court should be against a union, the 
result would be a loss of the charter and disintegration of the 
organization. In all probability they would stand better as 
incorporated bodies — entities in the eyes of the law — than they 
do as voluntary organizations. 

The decisions of the American courts relative to the liability 
of strikers in what is known as picketing are similar in tenor 
xxvin [ 10 ] 



THE TOILERS 

to those which have been made by the courts of England. The 
real question is whether strikers should be enjoined against 
maintaining patrols or any form of picket to prevent non- 
union men from entering the works of an establishment under 
strike, or from preventing the employer from carrying on his 
business unless he shall do certain things which have been de- 
manded of him. The courts have no hesitancy in declaring 
that where picketing is accompanied by intimidation or force 
the parties organizing or directing such force or intimidation 
are liable under criminal law. There are also some decisions 
declaring that picketing itself is a menace, and hence an in- 
timidation, and therefore illegal. There has been no decision, 
however, as far reaching as that in the Taff Vale railway case, 
recently decided by the House of Lords. The doctrine laid 
down by the Law Lords, however — that any organization that 
can work an injury must be held responsible for the damages 
resulting therefrom — will undoubtedly receive attention in 
America. 

Unions are very much opposed to the modern method of 
restraint through injunctions, and complain of the expansion 
of the injunction, under which strikers are warned to refrain 
from doing things which if done would be crimes under statutory 
law and punishable accordingly. They insist that, should they 
be accused of any violence, they should be allowed trial as crimi- 
nals or breakers of the law by a jury in the ordinary way, when 
they can have, under the bills of rights as they exist in the 
United States, the privilege of facing accusers and bringing 
forward evidence in their defence. Many eminent jurists feel 
that the expanded use of injunctions in late years is not in 
accordance with the strictest equity, but the difficulty lies in 
modifying by legislation some of the principles involved at 
common law in the writ of injunction. 

Trade unionists have undertaken to secure recognition 
through a system known as collective bargaining, the adoption 
of sliding scales being a feature of this work. Collective bar- 
gaining has also been indorsed in many cases by employers, 
but occasionally, as in the great Homestead strike in 1892 and 
some other labor conflicts, the scale has been a prominent 

XXVIII [ II ] 



THE TOILERS 

cause of difficulty. Er^oyers sometimes resent the idea 
of collective bargaining, because in carrying it out there must 
be a recognition of the union. Men like Mr. John Pier- 
pont Morgan, however, prefer to deal with well organized 
and administered trade unions as the medium through which 
to arrange questions of wages and other conditions of em- 
ployment, rather than to subject themselves to the chaotic 
and unreliable results which are found when workmen act as 
individuals. 

The great organizations are growing more and more con- 
servative, especially those represented in the American Feder- 
ation of Labor, which was organized permanently in December, 
1886, under its present name. The country at large owes a 
debt to this order which is not always or very generally recog- 
nized. At the time of the great strike in Chicago in 1894, when 
the American Railway Union, the order that organized the 
strike, demanded a general or sympathetic strike of all mechan- 
ics and artisans, the executive committee of the American 
Federation defeated this purpose, and no general strike occurred. 
Again, in the great steel strike of 1901, when the Amalgamated 
Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers thought that by 
a general strike, sympathetic in its nature in a sense, they 
would be able to win against the powerful United States Steel 
Corporation, the executive committee of the American Federa- 
tion of Labor declined to advise a general strike. In all proba- 
bility this action had as much to do with bringing the strike 
to an end as any one element. 

Of course, organized labor has received many very severe 
blows. The rapid decrease in membership and influence of 
the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers on 
account of the disorders at Homestead in 1892 is a vei7 striking 
instance in this direction. The same association lost, in a way, 
again in 1901, but on the whole it has been progressive, and now, 
by wise management, its position since the strike is encouraging. 
Unions come and unions go, but the most powerful and influen- 
tial have a long and honorable history, although conservatism 
and wise action have often been the result of radical, extreme, 
and dangerous methods. 

XXVIII I 12 ] 



THE TOILERS 

Probably the best known, and in a popular sense the wisest, 
union in the country is the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. 
This organization has exerted a sure and steadying influence in 
various controversies. Its members are called by the members 
of other unions the aristocracy of labor, but they came to their 
present enviable position through some of the extremest efforts 
to carry their points that have been made in this country. Their 
wisdom is the wisdom of experience, and the managers of the 
brotherhood have been wise enough to recognize experience. 
Other organizations are benefiting by such experience, and as 
time goes on they will exert a still greater influence in the in- 
dustrial field. Unions arc, as a rule, friendly to machinery, 
studying practical, economic questions, and arc not drags 
upon industry. The exceptions to this rule are now so few that 
they need not be considered. 

When the greatest capitalists of the country are ready to 
recognize and deal with unions, and to advocate the advantages, 
through conciliatory methods, which can come only through 
organizations, and to meet the leaders of labor unions in great 
conferences, as they have done recently, for the discussion of 
vital economic and moral questions, there need not be much 
fear of antagonism. The old suspicious attitude toward 
trade unions in the United States is practically a thing of the 
past. 



xxvirr [ 13 ] 



XXIX 



THE SOIL 

"LAND AND ITS OWNERSHIP IN THE PAST" 

BY 

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

PRESIDENT OP THE LAND NATURALIZATION SOCIETY 



<T^HAT the twentieth century will see radical changes in 
our social order every thoughtful man agrees. How 
these changes are to be accomplished, whether slowly and care- 
fully under the guidance of accepted and far-seeing leaders, or 
suddenly and tumuUuoiisly under pressure of bursting bonds, that 
no man can say with surety. Poiverful interests oppose themselves 
to hard necessities. 

Close allied with the question of the future of labor is the 
question of the future of land. Henry George eloquently preached 
to us the ^^ single tax" which should make the land, the soil 
itself, pay for everything. Somewhat in harmony with these 
views are those of Mr. Wallace, LL.D., F.R.S., whose age 
and whose high reputation as being, with Darwin, the codis- 
coverer of evolution, lend value to his every utterance. Such 
a man does not speak heedlessly, and when even Mr. Wallace 
declares that there is something radically wrong with our social 
order, that justice demands and will ultimately enforce a readjust- 
ment of all our conceptions of property^ surely it is time that 
we take thought. 

During many past centuries of oppression and wrong 
there has been an ever-present but rarely expressed cry for 
redress, for some small instalment of justice to the down- 
trodden workers. It has been the aspiration alike of the 
peasant and the philosopher, of the px)et and the saint. But 
the rule of the lords of the soil has ever been so hard, and 
XXIX [ I ] 



THE SOIL 

supported Ijy power so ^^crwhclming and punishment so 
severe, that the born thralls or serfs have rarely dared to do 
more than humbly petition for some partial relief ; or, if roused 
to rebel by unbearable misery and wrongs, they have soon 
been crushed by the power of mailed knights and armed re- 
tainers. The peasant revolt at the end of the fourteenth 
century was to gain relief from the oppressive serfdom that 
was enforced after the black death had diminished the number 
of workers. John Ball then preached socialism for the first 
time. 

"By what right," he said, "are they whom we call lords 
greater folk than we ? Why do they hold us in serfage ? . . . 
They are clothed in velvet, while we arc covered with rags. They 
have wine and spices and fair bread ; and wc oat-cake and straw, 
and water to drink. They have leisure and fine houses; we 
have pain and labor, the rain and the wind in the fields. And 
yet it is of us and our toil that these men hold their state." 

John Ball and Wat Tyler li\-ed five hundred years too soon. 
To-day the very same claims are made by men who, having 
got political power, cannot be so easily suppressed. 

A century passed, and the great martyr of freedom. Sir 
Thomas More, powerfully set forth the wrongs of the workers 
and the crimes of their rulers in his ever-memorable " Utopia." 
Near the end of this work he thus summarizes the governments 
of his time in words that will apply almost, if not quite, as 
accurately to-day: 

"Is not that government both unjust and ungrateful that 
is so prodigal of its favors to those that are called gentlemen, or 
such others who are idle, or live either by flattery or by contriv- 
ing the arts of vain pleasure, and, on the other hand, takes 
no care of those of a meaner sort, such as ploughmen, colliers, 
and smiths, without whom wc could not subsist? But after 
the public has reaped all the advantage of their service and they 
come to be oppressed with age, sickness, and want, all their 
labors and the good they have done is forgotten, and all the 
recompense given them is that they are left to die in great misery. 
The richer sort are often endeavoring to bring the hire of labor- 
ers lower — not only by their fraudulent practices, but by the 
XXIX [ 2 ] 



THE SOIL 

laws which they procure to be made to that effect ; so that though 
it is a thing most unjust in itself to give such small rewards 
to those who deserve so well of the public, yet they have given 
those hardships the name and color of justice, by procuring 
laws to be made for regulating them. 

"Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have 
no other notion of all the governments that I see or know than 
that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of 
managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and 
devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they 
may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill acquired, 
and then that they may engage the poor to toil and labor for 
them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as 
they please."^ 

Here we have a stern demand for justice to the workers 
who produce all the wealth of the rich, as clearly and as forcibly 
expressed as by any of our modern socialists. Sir Thomas 
More might, in fact, be well taken as the hero and patron 
saint of socialism. 

A century passed away before Bacon in England, and 
Campanelli in Italy, again set forth schemes of social regenera- 
tion. Bacon's " New Atalantis " supposed that the desired im- 
provement would come from man's increased command over the 
powers of nature, which would give wealth enough for all. 
We have, however, obtained this command to a far greater 
extent than Bacon could possibly have anticipated; yet its 
chief social effect has been the increase of luxury and the widen- 
ing of the gulf between rich and poor. Although material 
wealth, reckoned not in money but in things, has increased 
perhaps twenty or thirty fold in the last century, while the 
population has little more than doubled, yet millions of our 
people still live in the most wretched penury, the vi^hole vast 
increase of wealth having gone to increase the luxury and 
waste of the rich and the comfort of the middle classes. 

Campanelli, more far-sighted than Bacon, saw the need of 
social justice as well as increased knowledge, and proposed 
a system of refined communism. But all these ideas were 
^ Cassell's National Library, Utopia, p. 1 7 

XXIX [ 3 ] 



THE SOIL 

but as dreams of a golden ^pe, and had no influence whatever 
in amehorating the condition of the workers, which, with minor 
fluctuations, and having due regard to the progress of material 
civilization, may be said to have remained practically unchanged 
for the last three centuries. When one-fourth of all the deaths 
in London occur in workhouses and hospitals, notwithstanding 
that four millions are spent there annually in public charity, 
while untold thousands die in their wretched cellars and attics 
from the direct or indirect effects of starvation, cold, and 
unhealthy surroundings; and while all these terrible facts 
are repeated proportionately in all our great manufacturing 
towns, it is simply impossible that, within the time I have 
mentioned, the condition of the workers as a whole can have 
been much, if any, worse than it is now. 

At the end of the seventeenth, and during the eighteenth 
century, a new school of reformers arose, of whom Locke, 
Rousseau, and Turgot were representatives. They saw the 
necessity of a fundamental justice, especially as regards land, 
the source of all wealth. Locke declared that labor gave the 
only just title to land; while Rousseau was the author of the 
maxim that the produce of the land belongs to all men, the 
land itself to no one. The first Enghshman, however, who saw 
clearly the vast importance of the land question, and who 
laid down those principles with regard to it which are now 
becoming widely accepted, was an obscure Newcastle school- 
master, Thomas Spence, who in 1775 gave a lecture before the 
Philosophical Society of that town, which was so much in 
advance of the age that when he printed his lecture the society 
expelled him, and he was soon afterward obliged to leave the 
town. He maintained the sound doctrine that the land of any 
country or district justly belongs to those who live upon it, 
not to any individuals to the exclusion of the rest; and he 
points out, as did Herbert Spencer at a later period, the logical 
result of admitting private property in land. He says: 

"And any one of them (the landlords) still can, by laws 

of their own making, oblige every living creature to remove 

off his property (which, to the great distress of mankind, is 

too often put in execution); so, of consequence, were all the 

XXIX [ 4 ] 



THE SOIL 

landholders to be of one mind, and determined to take their 
properties into their own hands, all the rest of mankind might 
go to heaven if they could, for there would be no place found 
for them here. Thus men may not live in any part of this 
world, not even where they are born, but as strangers, 
and by the permission of the pretender to the property 
thereof." 

He maintained that every parish should have possession of its 
own land, to be let out to the inhabitants, and that each parish 
should govern itself and be interfered with as little as possible 
by the central government, thus anticipating the views as to 
local self-government which we are now beginning to put 
into practice. 

A few years later, in 1782, Professor Ogilvie published 
anonymously " An Essay on the Right of Property in Land, 
with respect to its foundation in the Law of Nature, its present 
establishment by the Municipal Laws of Europe, and the Regu- 
lations by which it might be rendered more beneficial to the 
lower Ranks of Mankind." This small work contains an 
elaborate and well-reasoned exposition of the whole land ques- 
tion, anticipating the arguments of Herbert Spencer in " Social 
Statics," of Mill, and of the most advanced modern land re- 
formers. But all these ideas were before their time, and pro- 
duced little or no effect on public opinion. The workers were 
too ignorant, too much oppressed by the struggle for bare ex- 
istence, while the middle classes were too short-sighted to be 
influenced by theoretical views which even to this day many of 
the most liberal thinkers seem unable fully to appreciate. But 
the chief cause that prevented the development of sound views 
on the vital problems of the land and of social justice was, 
undoubtedly, that men's minds were forcibly directed toward 
the great struggles for political freedom then in progress. The 
success of the American revolutionists and the establishment 
of a republic founded on a Declaration of the Rights of Man, 
followed by the great French Revolution and the Napoleonic 
wars, entirly obscured all lesser questions, and also led to a 
temporary and fictitious prosperity, founded on a gigantic debt 
the burden of which still oppresses us. These great events 
XXIX [ 5 ] 



THE SOIL 

irresistibly led to the disc^pion of questions of political and 
personal freedom rather than to those deeper problems of social 
justice of which we are now only beginning to perceive the 
full importance. The rapid growth of the use of steam power, 
the vast extension of our manufactures, and the rise of our 
factory system with its attendant horrors of woman and infant 
labor, crowded populations, spread of disease, and increase of 
mortality, loudly cried for palliation and restrictive legislation, 
and thus occupied much of the attention of philanthropists 
and politicians. 

CHARACTER OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY LEGISLATION 

Owing to this combination of events, the nineteenth century 
has been almost wholly devoted to two classes of legislation — 
the one directed to reform and popularize the machinery of 
government itself, the other to neutralize or palliate the evils 
arising from the unchecked powers of landlords and capitalists 
in their continual efforts to increase their wealth while almost 
wholly regardless of the life-shortening labor, the insanitary 
surroundings, and the hopeless misery of the great body of 
the workers. To the first class belong the successive Reform 
Bills, the adoption of the ballot in elections for members of 
Parliament, household and lodger suffrage, improved regis- 
tration, and the repression of bribery. To the second, restric- 
tion of children's and women's labor in factories and mines, 
government inspection of these industries ; attempts to diminish 
the dangers of unhealthy employments, and to check the ever- 
increasing pollution of rivers; the new poor law, casual wards, 
and other attempts to cope with pauperism; while various 
fiscal reforms, such as the abolition of the corn laws and the 
extension of free trade, though advocated in the supposed inter- 
est of the wage earners, were really carried by the efforts of 
great capitalists and manufacturers as a means of extending 
their foreign trade. Later on came the Elementary Education 
Act of 1870, which was thought by many to be the crowning 
of the edifice, and to complete all that could be done by legis- 
lation to bring about the well-being of the workers, and, through 
them, of the whole community. 
XXIX [ 6 ] 



THE SOIL 

ITS OUTCOME 

Now that we have had nearly a century of the two classes 
of legislation here referred to, it may be well briefly to take 
stock of its general outcome, and see how far it has secured — 
what all such legislation aims at securing^a fair share to all 
the workers of the mass of wealth they annually produce; a 
sufficiency of food, clothing, houseroom, and fuel; healthy 
surroundings; and some amount of leisure and surplus means 
for the lesser enjoyments of life. And it must be remembered 
that never in the whole course of human history has there 
been a century which has added so much to man's command 
over the forces of nature, and which has so enormously extended 
his power of creating and distributing all forms of wealth. 
Steam, gas, photography, and electricity, in all their endless 
applications, have given us almost unlimited power to obtain 
all necessaries, comforts, and luxuries that the world can supply 
us with. It has been calculated that the labor-saving machinery 
of all kinds now in use produces about a hundred times the 
result that could be produced if our workers had only the tools 
and appliances available a century ago. But even in the last 
century, not only was there produced a sufficiency of food, 
clothing, and houses for all workers, but an enormous surplus, 
which was appropriated by the landlords and other capitalists 
for their own consumption, while large numbers, then as now, 
were unprofitably employed in ministering to the luxury of 
the rich, or wastefully and wickedly employed in destroying life 
and property in civil or foreign wars. 

Taking first the anti-capitalistic or social legislation, we 
find that, though the horrible destruction of the health, the 
happiness, and the very lives of factory children has been 
largely reduced, there has grown up in our great cities a system 
of child labor as cruel and destructive, if not quite so extensive. 
Infants of four years and upward are employed at matchbox 
making and similar employments to assist in supporting the 
family. A widow and two children, working all day and much 
of the night, can only earn a shilling or eighteenpence from which 
to pay rent and support life. Children of school age have thus 
often to work till midnight after having had five hours' school- 
XXIX [ 7 ] 



THE SOIL 

ing; and till quite recent ly^f)oor mother in this state of penury 
was fined if she did not send the children to school and pay 
a penny daily for each, meaning so much less bread for herself 
or for the children. Of course for the children this is physical 
and mental destruction. The number of women thus struggling 
for a most miserable living — often a mere prolonged starvation 
— is certainly greater than at any previous period of our history, 
and even if the proportion of the population thus employed 
is somewhat less — and this is doubtful — the fact that the actual 
mass of human misery and degradation of this kind is abso- 
lutely greater is a horrible result of a century's remedial legis- 
lation, together with an increase of national wealth altogether 
unprecedented. 

Again if we turn to the amount of poverty and pauperism 
as a measure of the success of remedial legislation combined 
with a vast extension of private and systematized charity, 
we shall have cause for still more serious reflection. In 1888 the 
Registrar-General called attention to the fact that both through- 
out the country and to a still greater extent in London deaths 
in workhouses, hospitals, and other public charitable insti- 
tutions had been steadily increasing since 1875. A reference 
to the Annual Summaries of deaths in London shows the in- 
crease to have been continuous from i860 to 1895, the five- 
year periods giving the following results: 

In 1860—65 of total deaths in London, 16.2 per cent, occurred in 

charitable institutions. 
1866 70 (no material at hand). 
1871-75 of total deaths in London, 17.4 " 

1876-80 " " 18.6 

1881-85 " " 21. 1 

1886-90 " " 23.4 

1891-95 26.7 

When we add to this the admitted facts, that organized 

charity greatly increased during the same period, while the press 

still teems with records of the most terrible destitution, of 

Aiicides from the dread of starvation, and deaths directly 

caused or indirectly due to want, we are brought face to face 

XXIX [ 8 ] 



THE SOIL 

with a mass of human wretchedness that is absolutely appalling 
in its magnitude. And all this time Royal and ParUamentary 
Commissions have been inquiring and reporting, Mansion 
House and other committees have been collecting funds and 
relieving distress at every exceptional period of trouble, emigra- 
tion has been actively at work, improved dwellings have been 
provided, and education has been systematically urged on, with 
the final result that one-fourth of all the deaths in the richest 
city in the world occur in workhouses, hospitals, etc., and, in 
addition, unknown thousands die in their miserable garrets 
and cellars from various forms of slow or rapid starvation.^ 

Can a state of society which leads to this result be called 
civilization? Can a government which, after a century of 
continuous reforms and gigantic labors and struggles, is unable 
to organize society so that every willing worker may earn a 
decent living be called a successful government ? Is it beyond 
the wit of man to save a large proportion of one of the most 
industrious peoples in the world, inhabiting a rich and fertile 
country, from grinding poverty or absolute starvation? Is it 
impossible so to arrange matters that a sufficient portion of the 
wealth they create may be retained by the workers, even if 
the idle rich have a little less of profuse and wasteful luxury ? 

THE IMPOTENCE OF OUR LEGISLATORS 

Our legislators, our economists, our religious teachers, 
almost with one voice tell the people that any better organiza- 
tion of society than that which we now possess is impossible. 
That we must go on as we have been going on, patching here, 
altering there, now mitigating the severity of a distressing symp- 
tom, now slightly clipping the wings of the landlord, the capi- 
talist, or the sweater; but never going down to the root of the 
evil; never interfering with vested interests in ancestral wrong; 
never daring to do anything which shall diminish rent and in- 
terest and profit, and to the same extent increase the reward of 
labor; never seek out the fundamental injustice which de- 
prives men of their birthright in their native land, and enables 
a small number of landlords to tax the rest of the community 
to the amount of hundreds of millions for permission to culti- 
XXIX [ 9 ] 



THE SOIL 

vate and live upon the soil in the country of their birth. Can 
we, then, wonder that both workers and thinkers are getting 
tired of all this hopeless incapacity in their rulers? That, 
possessing education which has made them acquainted with the 
works of great writers on these matters, from Sir Thomas More 
to Robert Owen, from Henry George to Edward Bellamy, 
from Karl Marx to Carlyle and Ruskin; and possessing as 
they do ability, and honesty, and determination, fully equal 
to that of the coterie of landlords and capitalists which has 
hitherto governed them, they are determined, as soon as may be, 
to govern themselves. 

THE WORK OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

Now, I believe that the great work of the past century, 
that which is the true preparation for the work to be done 
in the twentieth century, is not its well-meant and temporarily 
useful but petty and tentative social legislation, but rather 
that gradual reform of the political machine — to be completed, 
it is to be hoped, within the next few years — which will enable 
the most thoughtful and able and honest among the manual 
workers to at once turn the balance of political power, and, 
at no distant period, to become the real and permanent rulers 
of the country. The very idea of such a government will excite 
a smile of derision or a groan of horror among the classes who 
have hitherto blundered and plundered at their will, and have 
thought they were Heaven-inspired rulers. But I feel sure that 
the workers will do very much better; and, forming as they do 
the great majority of the people, it is only bare justice that, 
after centuries of misgovernment by the idle and wealthy, 
they should have their turn. The larger part of the invention 
that has enriched the country has come from the workers; 
much of scientific discovery has also come from their ranks; 
and it is certain that, given equality of opportunity, they would 
fully equal, in every high mental and moral characteristic, 
the bluest blood in the nation. In the organization of their 
trades unions and co-operative societies, no less than in their 
choice of the small body of their fellow- workers who represent 
them in Parliament, they show that they are in no way inferior 
XXIX [ lO ] 



THE SOIL 

in judgment and in organizing power to the commercial, the 
literary, or the wealthy classes. The way in which, during the 
past few years, they have forced their very moderate claims 
upon the notice of the public, have secured advocates in the 
press and in Parliament, and have led both political econo- 
mists and politicians to accept measures which were not long 
before scouted as utterly beyond the sphere of practical politics, 
shows that they have already become a power in the state. 
Looking forward, then, to a government by workers and largely 
in the interest of workers, at a not distant date, I propose 
to set forth a few principles and suggestions as to the course 
of legislation calculated to abolish pauperism, poverty, and 
enforced idleness, and thus lay the foundation for a true civiliza- 
tion which will be benelicial to all. 

SUGGESTIONS FOR REAL REFORMS 

That the ownership of large estates in land by private 
individuals is an injustice to the workers and the source of 
much of their poverty and misery, is held by all the great writers 
I have alluded to, and has been fully demonstrated in many 
volumes. It has led directly to the depopulation of the rural 
districts, the abnormal growth of great cities, the diminished 
cultivation of the soil and reduced food supply, and is thus 
at once a social evil and a national danger. Some petty at- 
tempts are now making to restore the people to the land, but 
in a very imperfect manner. The first and highest use of our 
land is to provide healthy and happy homes, where all who 
desire it may live in permanent security and produce a consider- 
able portion of the food required by their families. Every 
other consideration must give way to this one, and all restric- 
tions on its realization must be abolished. Hence, the first 
work of the people's Parliament should be to give to the Parish 
and District Councils unrestricted power to take all land 
necessary for this purpose, so as to afford every citizen the 
freest possible choice of a home in which he can live absolutely 
secure (so long as he pays the very moderate ground rent) 
and reap the full reward of his labor. Every man, in his turn, 
should be able to choose both where he will live and how 

XXIX [ II ] 



THE SOIL 

much land he desires to h^c, since each one is the best judge 
of how much he can enjoy and make profitable. Our object 
is that all workingmen should succeed in life, should be able 
to live well and happily, and provide for an old age of comfort 
and repose. Every such landholder is a gain and a safety 
instead of a loss and a danger to the community, and no out- 
cry, either of existing landlords or of tenants of large farms, 
must be allowed to stand in their way. The well-being of the 
community is the highest law, and no private interests can be 
permitted to prevent its realization. When land can be thus 
obtained, co-operative communities, on the plan so clearly 
laid down by Mr. Herbert V. Mills in his work on " Poverty 
and the State " may also be established, and various forms of 
co-operative manufacture can be tried. 

THE INVIOLABILITY OF THE HOME 

But until this great reform can be effected there is a smaller 
and less radical measure of relief to all tenants, which should 
at once be advocated and adopted by the Liberal party. It 
is an old boast that the Englishman's house is his castle, but 
never was a boast less justified by facts. In a large number 
of cases a workingman's house might be better described as 
an instrument of torture, by means of which he can be forced 
to comply with his landlord's demands, and both in religion and 
pohtics submit himself entirely to the landlord's will. So long 
as the agricultural laborer, the village mechanic, and the village 
shopkeeper are the tenants of the landowner, the parson, or 
the farmer, religious freedom or political independence is 
impossible. And when those employed in factories or work- 
shops are obliged to live, as they so often are, in houses which 
are the property of their employers, that employer can force his 
will upon them by the double threat of loss of employment 
and loss of a home. Under such conditions a man possesses 
neither freedom nor safety, nor the possibility of happiness, 
except so far as his landlord and employer thinks proper, A 
secure Home is the very first essential alike of political freedom, 
of personal security, and of social well-being. 

Now that every worker, even to the hitherto despised and 

XXIX [ 12 ] 



THE SOIL 

down-trodden agricultural laborer, has been given a share 
in local self-government, it is time that, so far as affects the in- 
violability of the home, the landlord's power should be at once 
taken away from him. This is the logical sequence of the crea- 
tion of Parish Councils. For to declare that it is for the public 
benefit that every inhabitant of a parish shall be free to vote 
and to be chosen as a representative by his fellow-parishioners, 
and at the same time to leave him at the mercy of the individual 
who owns his house to punish him in a most cruel manner 
for using the privileges thus granted him, is surely the height 
of unreason and injustice. It is giving a stone in place of 
bread; the shadow rather than the substance of poHtical 
enfranchisement. 

There is, however, a very simple and effectual way of 
rendering tenants secure, and that is by a short Act of Par- 
liament declaring all evictions, or seizure of household goods, 
other than for non-payment of rent, to be illegal. And to 
prevent the landlord from driving away a tenant by raising 
his rent to an impossible amount, all alterations of rent must 
be approved of as reasonable by a committee of the Parish or 
District Council, and be determined on the apphcation of either 
the tenant or the landlord. Of course, at the first letting of a 
house the landlord could ask what rent he pleased, and if it 
was exorbitant he would get no tenant. But, having once let it, 
the tenant should be secure as long as he wished to occupy it, 
and the rent should not be raised except as allowed by some com- 
petent tribunal. No doubt a claim will be made on behalf of 
the landlords for a compulsory, not voluntary, tenancy on the 
part of the tenant; that is, that if the tenant has security of 
occupation, the landlord should have equal security of having 
a tenant. But the two cases are totally different. Eviction 
from his home may be, and often is, ruinous loss and misery 
to the tenant, who is therefore, to avoid such loss, often com- 
pelled to submit to the landlord's will. But who ever heard 
of a tenant, by the threat of giving notice to quit, compelhng 
his landlord to vote against his conscience, or to go to chapel 
instead of to church? The tenant needs protection, the land- 
lord does not. 

XXIX [ 13 ] 



THE SOIL 

The same result migilF perhaps be gained by giving the 
Parish and District Councils power to take over all houses 
whose tenants are threatened with eviction, or with an unfair 
increase of rent; but this would involve so many complications 
and would so burden these Councils with new and responsible 
work, that there is no chance of its being enacted for many 
years. But the plan of giving a legal permanent tenure to every 
tenant is so simple, so obviously reasonable, and so free from 
all interference with the fair money value of the landlord's 
property, that, with a little energy and persistent agitation, 
it might possibly be carried in two or three years. Such an 
Act might be more or less in the following form : 

"Whereas the security and inviolability of the Home is an 
essential condition of political freedom and social well-being, 
it is hereby enacted that no tenant shall hereafter be evicted 
from his house or homestead, or have his household goods 
seized, for any other cause than non-payment of rent, and every 
heir or successor of such tenant shall be equally secure so long 
as the rent is paid." 

A second clause would provide for a permanently fair 
rent. 

Now, will not some advanced Liberal bring in such a bill 
annually till it is carried ? It is, I think, one that would re- 
ceive the support of a large number of reformers, because it 
is absolutely essential to the free and fair operation of the Parish 
and District Councils, and is equally necessary for the well- 
being of the farmer and the tradesman, as well as for the 
mechanic and laborer. The annual discussion of the subject in 
Parliament would be of inestimable value, since it would alTord 
the opportunity of bringing prominently before the voters the 
numerous cases of gross tyranny and cruel injustice which are 
yearly occurring, but which now receive little consideration. 

THE UNBORN NOT TO INHERIT PROPERTY 

The next great guiding principle, and one that will enable 
us to carry out the resumption of the land without real injury 
to any individual, is that we should recognize no rights to prop- 
erty in the unborn, or even in persons under legal age, except 
XXIX [ 14 ] 



THE SOIL 

so far as to provide for their education and give them a suitable 
but moderate provision against want. This may be justified 
on two grounds. First, the law allows to individuals the right 
to will away their property as they please, so that not even the 
eldest son has any vested interest, as against the power of the 
actual owner of the property to leave it to whom or for what 
purpose he likes. Now, what an individual is permitted to 
do for individual reasons which may be good or bad, the State 
may do if it considers it necessary for the good of the community. 
If an individual may justly disinherit other individuals who have 
not already a vested interest in property, however just may 
be their expectations of succeeding to it, a fortiori the State 
may, partially, disinherit them for good and important reasons. 
In the second place, it is almost universally admitted by moral- 
ists and advanced thinkers that to be the heir to a great estate 
from birth is generally injurious to the individual, and is neces- 
sarily unjust to the community. It enables the individual to 
live a life of idleness and pleasure, which often becomes one 
of luxury and vice; while the community suffers from the bad 
example, and by the vicious standard of happiness which is set 
up by the spectacle of so much idleness and luxury. The 
working part of the community, on the other hand, suffers 
directly in having to provide the whole of the wealth thus 
injuriously wasted. Many people think that if such a rich man 
pays for everything he purchases and wastes, the workers do 
do not suffer because they receive an equivalent for their labor; 
but such persons overlook the fact that every pound spent by 
the idle is first provided by the workers. If the income thus 
spent is derived from land, it is they who really pay the rents 
to the landlord, inasmuch as if the landlord did not receive 
them they would go in reduction of taxation. If it comes from 
the funds or from railway shares, they equally provide it, in the 
taxes, in high railway fares, and increased price of goods 
due to exorbitant railway charges. Even if all taxes were raised 
by an income tax paid by rich men only, the workers would be 
the real payers, because there is no other possible source of 
annual income in the country but productive labor. If any 
one doubts this, let him consider what would happen were "the 
XXIX [15] 



THE SOIL 

people to resume the land cT^heir right, and thenceforth apply 
the rents, locally, to establish the various factories and other 
machinery needful to supply all the wants of the community. 
Gradually all workers would be employed on the land, or in the 
various co-operative or municipal industries, and would them- 
selves receive the full product of their labors. To facilitate 
their exchanges they might establish a token or paper currency, 
and they would then have little use for gold or silver. How, 
then, could idlers live, if these workers, in the Parliament of 
the country, simply declined to pay the interest on debts con- 
tracted before they were born? What good would be their 
much vaunted "capital," consisting as it mostly does of mere 
legal power to take from the workers a portion of the product 
of their labors, which power would then have ceased; while 
their real capital — buildings, machinery, etc. — would bring 
them not one penny, since the workers would all possess their 
own, purchased by their own labor and the rents of their own 
land? Let but the workers resume possession of the soil, 
which was first obtained by private holders by force or fraud, 
or by the gift of successive kings who had no right to give it, 
and capitalists as a distinct class from workers must soon cease 
to exist. 

NO RIGHT TO TAX FUTURE GENERATIONS 

Another principle of equal importance is to refuse to recog- 
nize the right of any bygone rulers to tax future generations. 
Thus, all grants of land by kings or nobles, all "perpetual" 
pensions, and all war debts of the past, should be declared to 
be legally and equitably invalid, and henceforth dealt with 
in such a way as to relieve the workers of the burden of their 
payment as speedily as is consistent with due consideration 
for those whose chief support is derived from such sources. 
Just as we are now coming to recognize that a " living wage " is 
due to all workers, so we should recognize a " maximum income " 
determined by the standard of comfort of the various classes 
of fund holders and State or family pensioners. As a rule, 
these persons might be left to enjoy whatever they now possess 
during their lives, and when they had relatives dependent on 
XXIX [ i6 ] 



THE SOIL 

them the income might be continued to these, either for their 
lives or for a Umitcd period, according to the circumstances 
of each case. There would be no necessity, and I trust no 
inclination, to cause the slightest real privation, or even in- 
convenience, to those who are but the product of a vicious 
system; but on every principle of justice and equity it is im- 
possible to recognize the rights of deceased kings — most of them 
the worst and most contemptible of men — to burden the work- 
ers for all time in order to keep large bodies of their fellow-, 
citizens in idleness and luxury. 

HOW TO DEAL WITH ACCUMULATED WEALTH 

By means of the principles now laid down, we can see how 
to deal fairly with the present possessors of great estates, and 
with millionaires, whose vast wealth confers no real benefit 
on themselves, while it necessarily robs the workers, since, 
as we have seen, it has all to be provided by the workers. It 
will, I think, be admitted that, if a man has an income, say, 
of ten thousand a year, that is sufficient to supply him with 
every possible necessary, comfort, and rational luxury, and 
that the possession of one or more additional ten thousands of 
income would not really add to his enjoyment. But all such 
excessive incomes necessarily produce evil results, in the large 
number of idle dependants they support, and in keeping up 
habits of gambling and excessive luxury. Further, in the case 
of landed estates, the management of which is necessarily left to 
agents and bailiffs, it leads to injurious interference with agri- 
culture and with the political and religious freedom of tenants, to 
oppression of laborers, to the depopulation of villages, and 
other well-known evils. It will therefore be for the public ben- 
efit to fix on a maximum income to be owned by any citizen ; 
and, thereupon, to arrange a progressive income tax, beginning 
with a very small tax on a minimum income from land or realiz- 
ed property of, say, ;;^5oo, the tax progressively rising, at first 
slowly, afterward more rapidly, so as to absorb all above the 
fixed maximum. 

When a landed estate was taken over for the use of the 
community, the net income which had been derived from 
XXIX [17] 



THE SOIL 

it would be paid the late MRder for his life, and might be con- 
tinued for the lives of such of his direct heirs as were of age at 
the time of passing the Act, or it might even be extended to 
all direct heirs living at that time. In the case of a person own- 
ing many landed estates in different counties, he might be given 
the option of retaining any one or more of them up to the max- 
imum income, and that income would be secured to him (and 
his direct heirs as above stated) in case any of the land were 
taken for public use. In the case of fund -holders, all above the 
maximum income would be extinguished, and thus reduce 
taxation. 

The process here sketched out — by which the continuous 
robbery of the people through the systems of land and fund 
holding may be at first greatly reduced and in the course of 
one or two generations completely stopped, without, as I main- 
tain, real injury to any living person and for the great benefit 
both of existing workers and of the whole nation in the future — 
will, of course, be denounced as confiscation and robbery. 
That is the point of view of those who now benefit by the acts 
of former robbers and confiscators. From another, and I 
maintain a truer point of view, it may be described as an act 
of just and merciful restitution. Let us, therefore, consider 
the case a little more closely. 

ORIGIN OF GREAT ESTATES. 

Taking the inherited estates of the great landed proprietors 
of England, almost all can be traced back to some act of con- 
fiscation of former owners or to gifts from kings, often as the 
reward for what we now consider to be disgraceful services 
or great crimes. The whole of the property of the abbeys and 
monasteries, stolen by Henry VIII. and mostly given to the 
worst characters among the nobles of his court, was really a 
robbery of the people, who obtained relief and protection from 
the former owners. The successive steps by which the land- 
lords got rid of the duties attached to landholding under the 
feudal system, and threw the main burden of defence and of 
the cost of government on non-landholders, was another direct 
robbery of the people. Then in later times, and down to 
XXIX [ i8 ] 



THE SOIL 

the present century, we have that barefaced robbery by form 
of law, the enclosure of the commons, leading, perhaps more 
than anything else, to the misery and destruction of the rural 
population. Much of this enclosure was made by means of 
false pretences. The general Enclosure Acts declare that the 
purpose of enclosure is to facilitate "the productive employment 
of labor" in the improvement of the land. Yet hundreds of 
thousands of acres in all parts of the country, especially in 
Surrey, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and other southern counties, 
were simply taken from the people and divided among the sur- 
rounding landlords, and then only used for sport, not a single 
pound being spent in cultivating it. Now, however, during 
the last twenty years, much of this land is being sold for building 
at high building prices, a purpose never contemplated when the 
Enclosure Acts were obtained. During the last two centuries 
more than seven millions of acres have been thus taken from 
the poor by men who were already rich, and the more land 
they already possessed the larger share of the commons was allot- 
ted to them. Even a Royal Commission, in 1869, declared 
that these enclosures were often made "without any com- 
pensation to the smaller commoners, deprived agricultural 
laborers of ancient rights over the waste, and disabled the 
occupants of new cottages from acquiring new rights." 

Now, in this long series of acts of plunder of the people's 
land, we have every circumstance tending to aggravate the crime. 
It was robbery of the poor by the rich. It was robbery of the 
weak and helpless by the strong. And it had that worst fea- 
ture which distinguishes roljbery from mere confiscation — the 
plunder was divided among the individual robbers. Yet, 
again, it was a form of robbery specially forbidden by the re- 
ligion of the robbers, a religion for which they professed the 
deepest reverence, and of which they considered themselves 
the special defenders. They read in what they call the Word of 
God, "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field 
to field, till there is no place, that they may be placed alone in 
the midst of the earth," yet this is what they are constantly 
striving for, not by purchase only, but by robbery. Again they 
are told, "The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is 
XXIX [ 19 ] 



THE SOIL 

Mine"; and at every fif^^i year all land was to return to 
the family that had sold it, so that no one could keep land beyond 
the year of jubilee ; and the reason was that no man or family 
should remain permanently impoverished. 

Both in law and in morality the receiver of stolen goods is 
as bad as the thief; and even if he has purchased a stolen 
article unknowingly an honorable man will, when he discovers 
the fact, restore it to the rightful owner. Now, our great 
hereditary landlords know very well that they are the legal 
possessors of much stolen property, and, moreover, property 
which their religion forbids them to hold in great quantities. 
Yet we have never heard of a single landlord making restitution 
to the robbed nation. On the contrary, they take every oppor- 
tunity of adding to their vast possessions, not only by purchase, 
but by that meanest form of robbery — the enclosing of every 
scrap of roadside grass they can lay their hands on, so that the 
wayfarer or the tourist may have nothing but dust or gravel 
to walk upon, and the last bit of food for the cottager's donkey 
or goose is taken away from him. 

This all-embracing system of land robbery, for which noth- 
ing is too great and nothing too little; which has absorbed 
meadow and forest, moor and mountain; which has secured 
most of our rivers and lakes, and the fish which inhabit them; 
which often claims the very seashore and rocky coast line of 
our island home, making the peasant pay for his seaweed 
manure and the fisherman for his bait of shellfish; which has 
desolated whole counties to replace men by sheep or cattle, 
and has destroyed fields and cottages to make a wilderness for 
deer; which has stolen the commons and filched the roadside 
wastes; which has driven the laboring poor into the cities, 
and has thus been the primary and chief cause of the lifelong 
misery, disease, and early death of thousands who might have 
lived lives of honest toil and comparative comfort had they 
been permitted free access to land in their native villages; — 
it is the advocates and beneficiaries of this inhuman system, 
the members of this "cruel organization," who, when a partial 
restitution of their unholy gains is proposed, are the loudest in 
their cries of "robbery!" But all the robbery, all the spolia- 
jcxix [ 20 ] 



THE SOIL 

tion, all the legal and illegal filching has been on their side, 
and they still hold the stolen property. They make laws to 
justify their actions, and we propose equally to make laws 
which will really justify ours, because, unhke their laws which 
always took from the poor to give to the rich, ours will take 
only from the superfluity of the rich, not to give to the poor 
individually, but to enable the poor to live by honest work, to 
restore to the whole people their birthright in their native soil, 
and to reheve all ahke from a heavy burden of unnecessary 
taxation. This will be the true statesmanship of the future, 
and will be justified alike by equity, by ethics, and by religion. 
And now, in conclusion, I will give one or two extracts 
from a book written by a self-taught worker for workers, 
to show how workers feel on the questions we have touched 

upon. 

"At present the working people of this country live under 

conditions altogether monstrous. Their labor is much too 

heavy, their pleasures are too few; and in their close streets 

and crowded houses decency and health and cleanhness are 

wellnigh impossible. It is not only the wrong of this that I 

resent, it is the waste. Look through the slums, and see what 

childhood, girlhood, womanhood, and manhood have there 

become. Think what a waste of beauty, of virtue, of strength, 

and of all the power and goodness that go to make a nation 

great, is being consummated there by ignorance and by injustice. 

For, depend upon it, every one of our brothers or sisters ruined 

or slain by poverty or vice is a loss to the nation of so much 

bone and sinew, of so much courage and skill, of so much glory 

and delight. Cast your eyes, then, over the Registrar- General's 

returns, and imagine, if you can, how many gentle nurses, 

good mothers, sweet singers, brave soldiers, clever artists, 

inventors and thinkers, are swallowed up every year in that 

ocean of crime and sorrow which is known to the ofhcial mind 

as 'the high death rate of the wage-earning classes.' Alas! 

the pity of it." 

And again, from the same writer: 

"A short time ago a certain writer, much esteemed for his 
graceful style of saying silly things, informed us that the poor 

XXIX [ 21 ] 



THE SOIL 

remained poor because thd^how no efficient desire to be any- 
thing else. Is that true? Are only the idle poor? Come with 
me, and 1 will show you where men and women work from 
morning till night, from week to week, from year to year, at 
the full stretch of their powers, in dim and fetid dens, and yet 
are poor, ay, destitute — have for their wages a crust of bread 
and rags. I will show you where men work in dirt and heat, us- 
ing the strength of brutes, for a dozen hours a day, and sleep 
at night in styes, until brain and muscle are exhausted; and 
fresh slaves are yoked to the golden car of commerce, and the 
broken drudges filter through the union or the prison, to a 
felon's or a pauper's grave! And I will show you how men 
and women thus work and suffer, and faint and die, generation 
after generation, and I will show you how the longer and harder 
these wretches toil the worse their lot becomes; and I will 
show you the graves and find witnesses to the histories of brave 
and noble industrious poor men, whose lives were lives of toil 
and poverty, and whose deaths were tragedies. And all these 
things are due to sin; but it is to the sin of the smug hypocrites 
who grow rich upon the robbery and the ruin of their fellow- 
creatures." 

These extracts are from a small but weighty book called 
"Merrie England," by Nunquam. In the form of a series of 
letters on socialism to a workingman, it contains more impor- 
tant facts, more acute reasoning, more conclusive argument, 
and more good writing, thart are to be found in any English 
work on the subject 1 am acquainted with. When such men — 
and there are many of them — are returned to Parliament, and 
are able to influence the government of the country, the dawn 
of a new era, bright with hope for the long-suffering workers, 
will be at hand. 



XXIX [ 22 ] 



XXX 



ANARCHISM 

"THOU SHALT NOT KILL" 

BY 

COUNT LEO TOLSTOI 

AND 

GEORGE J. HOLYOAKE 



OOCIALISM with all its various shades 0} speculation has 
powerful advocates among our leaders 0} intellect, but 
anarchism has no friends except among the rebels 0} extremely 
rabid type. Even Tolstoi, of all our philosophers perhaps the 
most "advanced,'' the keenest 0} insight and least fettered 0} con- 
vention, even he cries out against anarchism, not for its savagery, 
which he denies, but for its mistaken folly. Anarchism is a 
disease; and its cause, as in all diseases, must lie in some unhealthy 
condition of the body politic. Perhaps we need only to suppress 
the outbreak of the evil; perhaps a wiser effort might be made 
to cure it by discovering and eradicating its cause. Hence we 
supplement here the views of the Russian, Tolstoi, with those of 
Mr. Holyoake, a well-known Member of Parliament in England. 
Between them they point out for us very fully the sources, the 
dangers, and the probable results of this wholly unsatisfactory 
product of our civilization. 

" Thou shalt do no murder." — Ex. xx. 13. 

" The disciple is not above his master: but every one when he is 
perfected shall be as his master." — Luke vi. 40. 

"*For all they that take up the sword shall perish with the sword." — 
Matt. xxvi. 52. 

" All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto 
you, even so do ye also unto them." — Matt. vii. 12. 

"When kings arc tried and executed like Charles I., Louis 
XVI., and Maximilian of Mexico; or killed in a palace con- 
XXX [ I ] 



ANARCHISM 

spiracy like Peter III., I^pl, and all kinds of Sultans, Shahs, 
and Khans, the event is generally passed over in silence. But 
when one of them is killed without a trial, and not by a palace 
conspiracy; like Henry IV., Alexander II., Carnot, the Empress 
of Austria, the Shah of Persia, and, recently, King Humbert 
of Italy, then such murder causes great surprise and indigna- 
tion among Kings and Emperors, and those attached to them, 
as if they were the great enemies of murder, as if they never 
profited by murder, never took part in it, and never gave orders 
to commit it. And yet the kindest of these murdered Kings, 
such as Alexander II., or Humbert, were guilty of the murder 
of tens of thousands of persons killed on the battlefield, not 
to mention those executed at home ; while hundreds of thousands, 
and even millions, of people have been killed, hanged, beaten 
to death, or shot, by the more cruel Kings and Emperors. 

Christ's teaching cancels the law "an eye for an eye, a 
tooth for a tooth"; but those men who have kept to the older 
law and still keep to it, who act upon it by punishing and 
carrying on wars, :and who not only act on the law "an eye 
for an eye," but give orders to kill thousands without any 
provocation, by declaring vv^ar — they have no right to be in- 
dignant when the same law is applied to themselves in so in- 
finitesimal a measure that hardly one King or Emperor gets 
killed to a hundred thousand, or perhaps to a million, ordinary 
people killed by the order or with the consent of Kings and 
Emperors. 

Kings and Emperors should not be indignant when such 
murders as that of Alexander II. or Humbert occur, but should, 
on the contrary, be surprised that such murders are so rare, 
considering the continual and universal example of committing 
murders they themselves set the people. 

Kings and Emperors are surprised and horrified when one 
of themselves is murdered, and yet the whole of their activity 
consists in managing murder and preparing for murder. The 
keeping up, the teaching and exercising, of armies with which 
Kings and Emperors are always so much occupied, and of 
which they are the organizers — what is it but preparation for 
murder ? 

XXX [ 2 ] 



ANARCHISM 

The masses are so hypnotized that, though they see what is 
continually going on around them, they do not understand 
what it means. They see the unceasing care Kings, Emperors, 
and Presidents bestow on disciplined armies, see the parades, 
reviews, and manoeuvres they hold, and of which they boast 
to one another, and the people eagerly crowd to see how their 
own brothers, dressed up in bright-colored, glittering clothes, 
are turned into machines to the sound of drums and trumpets, 
and, obedient to the shouting of one man, all make the same 
movements; and they do not understand the meaning of it all. 

Yet the meaning of such drilhng is very clear and simple. 
It is preparing for murder. It means the stupefying of men in 
order to convert them into instruments for murdering. 

And it is just Kings and Emperors and Presidents who 
do it, and organize it, and pride themselves on it. And it is 
these same people whose special employment is murder organ- 
izing, who have made murder their profession, who dress in 
military uniforms, and carry weapons (swords at their side), 
who are horror-struck and indignant when one of themselves 
is killed. 

It is not because such murders as the recent murder of 
Humbert are exceptionally cruel that they are so terrible. 
Things done by the order of Kings and Emperors, not only in 
the days of old, such as the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
persecutions for faith, terrible ways of putting down peasant 
riots, but also the present executions, the torture of solitary 
cells and disciplinary battalions, hanging, decapitation, shoot- 
ing, and slaughter at the wars, are incomparably more cruel 
than the murders committed by anarchists. 

Nor is it on account of their injustice that these murders 
are terrible. If Alexander and Humbert did not deserve death, 
the thousands of Russians who perished at Plevna, and of Ital- 
ians who perished in Abyssinia, deserved it still less. No, 
it is not because of their cruelty and injustice these murders 
are terrible, but because of the want of reason in those who 
perpetrate them. 

If the regicides commit murder under the influence of 
feelings of indignation, evoked by witnessing the sufferings of 
XXX [ 3 ] 



ANARCHISM 

the enslaved people, for wich suferings they hold Alexander 
II., Carnot, or Humbert responsible, or because they are in- 
fluenced by personal desire for revenge — however immoral 
such conduct may be, still it is comprehensible; but how can 
an organized body of anarchists such as those by whom, it 
is said, Bressi was sent out, and by whom another Emperor 
was threatened, how can it, quietly considering means of im- 
proving the condition of the people, find nothing better to do 
than to murder people, the killing of whom is as useful as cutting 
off one of the Hydra's heads ? 

Kings and Emperors have long established a system resem- 
bling the mechanism of a magazine rifle, i.e., as soon as one 
bullet flies out another takes its place. "Z-g roi est mort — vive 
le roir^ Then what is the use of killing them? It is only 
from a most superficial point of view that the murder of such 
persons can seem a means of saving the people from oppression 
and wars, which destroy their lives. 

We need only remember that the same kind of oppression 
and war went on no matter who stood at the head of the Gov- 
ernment : Nicholas or Alexander, Louis or Napoleon, Frederic 
or William, Palmerston or Gladstone, McKinley or any one 
else, in order to see that it is not some definite person who causes 
the oppression and the wars from which people suffer. 

The misery of the people is not caused by individuals, but 
by an order of Society by which they are bound together in a 
way that puts them in the power of a few, or, more often, of 
one man: a man so depraved by his unnatural position — 
having the fate and lives of millions of people in his power — 
that he is always in an unhealthy state and suffering more or 
less from a mania of self-aggrandizement, which is not noticed 
in him only because of his exceptional position. 

Apart from the fact that such men are surrounded, from 
the cradle to the grave, by the most insane luxury and its usual 
accompaniment of flattery and servility, the whole of their 
education, and all their occupations, are centred on the one 
object of murder, the study of murder in the past, the best 
means of murdering in the present, the best ways of preparing 
for murder in the future. From their earliest years they learn 
XXX [ 4 ] 



ANARCHISM 

the art of murder in all possible forms, always carry about with 
them instruments of murder, dress in different uniforms, attend 
parades, manoeuvres, and reviews, visit each other, present 
orders and the command of regiments to each other. And 
yet not only does nobody tell them the real name of their actions, 
not only does nobody tell them that preparing for murder is 
revolting and criminal, but they hear nothing but praise and 
words of admiration from all around them for these actions. 

The only part of the Press that reaches them, and which 
seems to them to be the expression of the feelings of the best 
of the people or their best representatives, exalts all their 
words and deeds, however silly and wicked they may be, in 
the most servile manner. All who surround them, men and 
women, cleric or lay, all these people who do not value human 
dignity, vie with each other in flattering them in the most re- 
fined manner, agree with them in everything, and deceive them 
continually, making it impossible for them to know life as it 
is. These men might live to be a hundred and never see a 
real, free man, and never hear the truth. 

We are sometimes appalled by the words and deeds of these 
men, but if we only consider their state we cannot but see that 
any man would act in the same way in such a position. A 
reasonable man can do but one thing in such a position, i.e., 
leave it. Every one who remains in such a position will act 
in the same manner. 

What, indeed, must be going on in the head of some William 
of Germany, a man of limited understanding, little education, 
and with a great deal of ambition, whose ideals are like those 
of a German "junker," when any silly or horrid thing he may 
say is always met w^ith an enthusiastic " Hoch!" and commented 
on, as if it were something very important, by the Press of the 
whole world ? He says that the soldiers should be prepared 
to kill their own fathers in obedience to his command. The 
answer is "Hurrah!" He says the Gospels must be introduced 
with a fist of iron. "Hurrah!" He says that the Army must 
not take any prisoners in China, but kill all, and he is not placed 
in a lunatic asylum, but they cry "Hurrah!" and set sail for 
China to execute his orders. 

XXX [ 5 ] 



ANARCHISM 

Or Nicholas, who, tliRtgh naturally modest, begins his 
reign by declaring to venerable old men, in answer to the de- 
sire they express of being allowed to discuss their own affairs, 
that their hope for self-government is a senseless dream. And 
the organs of the Press that reach him, and the people whom 
he meets, praise him for it. He proposes a childish, silly, 
and untruthful project of universal peace at the same time 
that he is ordering an increase of the Army, and even then 
there are no limits to the laudations of his wisdom and his 
virtue. Without any reason, he senselessly and pitilessly offends 
the v/hole of the Finnish nation, and again hears nothing but 
praise. At last he enters upon the Chinese slaughter, terrible 
by its injustice, cruelty, and its contrast with his project of 
peace; and he gets applauded simultaneously from all sides, 
both for his own conquests and for his adherence to his father's 
policy of peace. What must indeed be going on in the heads 
and hearts of such men? 

So that it is not Alexanders and Humberts, Williams, 
Nicholases, and Chamberlains, who are the cause of oppression 
and war, even though they do organize them, but it is those who 
have placed them in, and support them in, a position in which 
they have power over the life and death of men. 

Therefore it is not necessary to kill Alexanders and Nicho- 
lases, Williams and Humberts, but only to leave off supporting 
the social condition of which they are the product. It is the 
selfishness and stupefaction of the people who sell their freedom 
and their honor for insignificant material advantages which 
supports the present state of society. 

Those who stand on the lowest rung of the ladder, partly 
as a consequence of being stupefied by a patriotic and pseudo- 
religious education, partly for the sake of personal advantages, 
give up their freedom and their feeling of human dignity to those 
who stand higher, and who offer them material advantages. 
In a like position are those standing a little higher. They, 
too, through being stupefied, and especially for material ad- 
vantages, give up their freedom and sense of human dignity. 
The same is true of those standing still higher; and so it con- 
tinues up to the highest rungs, up to the person or persons who, 
XXX [ 6 ] 



ANARCHISM 

standing on the very summit of the social cone, have no one 
to submit to, nor anywhere to rise to, and have no motive for 
action except ambition and love of power. These are generally 
so depraved and stupefied by their insane power over life and 
death, and by the flattery and servility of those around them, 
which is connected with such power, that while doing evil 
they feel convinced they are the benefactors of the human 
race. It is the people themselves who, by sacrificing their 
human dignity for material profits, produce these men, and are 
afterw^ards angry with them for their stupid and cruel acts; 
murdering such people is like whipping children after spoiling 
them. 

Very little seems needed to stop oppression and useless war, 
and to prevent any one from being indignant with those who 
seem to be the cause of such oppression and war. 

Only that things should be called by their right names and 
seen as they are; that it should be understood that an army 
is an instrument of murder, that the recruiting and drilling of 
armies which Kings, Emperors, and Presidents carry on with 
so much self-assurance are preparations for murder. 

If only every King, Emperor, and President would under- 
stand that his work of organizing armies is not an honorable 
and important duty, as his flatterers persuade him it is, but a 
most abominable business, i.e., the preparing for, and the man- 
aging of, murder. If only every private individual understood 
that the payment of taxes which helps to equip soldiers, and, 
above all, militaiy service, are not immaterial but highly im- 
moral actions, by which he not only permits murder, but 
takes part in it himself — then this power of the Kings and Em- 
perors which arouses indignation, and causes them to be killed, 
would come to an end of itself. 

And so the Alexanders, Carnots, Humberts, and others 
should not be killed, but it ought to be shown them that they 
are murderers; and, above all, they should not be allowed to 
kill men; their orders to murder should not be obeyed. 

If men do not yet act in this manner, it is only because 
Governments, to maintain themselves, diligently exercise a hyp- 
notic influence upon the people. Therefore we can help to 
XXX [ 7 ] 



ANARCHISM 

prcvcnl people killing Kin|^and each other, not by murder — 
murders only strengthen this hypnotic state — but by arousing 
men from the delusion in which they are held. 

And it is this that I have tried to do in these remarks. 



BY 

GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE 

Anarchism arises from the despair of the good and the 
malevolence of the bad. There are two kinds of anarchists, 
just as there are two kinds of Tories. The social kind seek 
power, that they may control public affairs for the good of the 
people, which they believe they can better manage than the 
people themselves. The political Tories seek paramountcy 
and authority for pride or interest, and are indifferent or hostile 
to the welfare of the people — not counting them of conse- 
quence. In like manner there are anarchists who seek by 
reason to supersede public government by self-government — 
a slow, long-lasting task. There is another and brutal class of 
anarchists who are animated by resentment and the baser sort 
by vengeance. They seek to destroy the most conspicuous repre- 
sentatives of order or government. They have that purpose, 
but no plan. Their future is only a day or a week. Their 
motive, so far as they can be said to have one, is to bring about 
a change. They think any change must be for the better — 
which shows their credulity. They are under the impression 
that were authority destroyed things would right themselves — 
which they never do. The prospect that they will is so hopeless 
that persons on this sane side of madness can never accept this 
wild and blind solution of societarian wrongs, whatever they 
may be. Whoever puts this dismal doctrine into practice must 
be arrested, and the repetition of the offence made impossible 
or improbable. Society must vindicate itself against irresponsible 
subjection. Yet it may temper the expression of public wrath 
XXX [ 8 ] 



ANARCHISM 

to remember that the awful belief that murder is a mode of 
progress is not peculiar to anarchists. Charles the Second 
gave a colonelcy to Silas Titus, who wrote inciting the assassi- 
nation of the Lord Protector Cromwell. English Tories fav- 
ored the assassination of Napoleon, and he in his turn pensioned 
the man who sought the assassination of Wellington. All the 
monarchs of F.uropc praised the knife of Charlotte Corday. 
Froude has shown that Catholics and Protestants have alike ap- 
proved tyrannicide and used it. Did not Lord Beaconsfield 
" bless the hand that wields the regicidal steel" ? We all know 
how the French Revolutionists ruined their cause and perished 
by the hands of their own adherents, and led to a worse des- 
potism than that which they subverted, and established it or 
strengthened it all over Europe. If the anarchists of the dagger 
or the bullet had their way, they would all be destroyed by their 
own disciples of more " advanced views," who would find their 
existence an obstacle to further progress. Therefore let the doc- 
trine that murder is a mode of progress be execrated wherever 
it shows itself in high place or low, in the yellow press or in the 
streets. Carlyle, by his dangerous gospel of force, has- done 
more than all the anarchists to demoralize our national policy 
and to inspire political assassination with a sense of rectitude, 
as I learned from IMadame Pulsky. It caused Canon Kingsley, 
just-minded as he was, and Lord Tennyson, who had as many 
virtues as gifts, to support, to applaud Governor Eyre's murders 
in Jamaica. I sat by Governor Eyre in the House of Commons 
when Mr. Cardwell (afterwards Lord Cardwell) admitted that 
there had been unnecessary "executions," which is the parlia- 
mentary name for murder. I hate anarchy alike in military 
or civil life, and all that leads to it or incites revenge by death, 
as does the new doctrine — that "leniency is a mistake" — that 
it is weakness or cowardice. Can there be any wonder that 
some people, for the ends of their hatred, better these perilous 
instructions? And so incited, the pitiless sentiment acts 
equally in republics and monarchies. 

Anarchism is not a modern invention — is not a foreign device 
— it is a disease of impatience in politics, and many have it. 
But it is without excuse in countries where reasonable freedom 
XXX [ 9 ] 



ANARCHISM 

exists. If with a free pres^frec speech, and a free Parliament, 
agitators cannot advance just objects, they do not understand 
their business. 

Nameless incidents to outrage everybody is willing to see 
forbidden. Those who are invited to act upon the advice of 
the writer have a right to know upon whose authority they are 
to place themselves in jeopardy. When a publisher, I exacted 
this condition in respect of any pamphlet of perilous tendency 
brought to me. Authors of deadly counsel against the state 
could not, or should not, object, when called upon, to explain 
their intent. It was Bakunin who first in modern days proposed 
to end government by the knife. He was listened to because 
he was a Russian and belonged to a land where reason was not 
tolerated and irresponsible ferocity ruled. Wiser and nobler 
men than Bakunin, men of unrivalled learning, such as Eliscc 
Reclus, his brother Elie, and others, are philosophical anarchists. 

Elie Reclus came to me to solicit a scarce engraving of 
Robert Owen, a famous advocate of progress by reason. The 
philosophical anarchists adopt, or accept, the name, but have 
no anarchy in them. They are against conventional govern- 
ment — not from malice, but because they think self-govern- 
ment nobler. What they seek is unlimited freedom, which, 
if set going to-morrow, would not last a month. They hold 
that free association will be the ultimate form of society. There 
is no disquietude in that — but the distance to it is distressing. 
They are for voluntary, not compulsory society. Their passion 
is for absolute individual freedom. It may be described as 
individuality run mad — as men and things go. Yet it is not a 
bad theory that a man should be a law unto himself. Others 
have thought that who are not counted as anarchists. But 
he who is to be a law unto himself should have a perfect self. 
And society has reared very few of that kind. True, Shakes- 
peare says, "To thine own self be true." But if a man who 
was a rascal by nature, or policy, or interest, were true to him- 
self, he would be a very undesirable person to knov/. How- 
ever, this theory of anarchy has no bullet in it and its discussion 
no harm in it. 

Society would be sillv not to distinguish between the anarchy 
XXX [ lo ] 



• ANARCHISM 

of reason and the anarchy of violence. To the anarchy. of 
assassination there can be but one answer: whether the motive 
be good or ill, benevolent or hostile, its hand must be arrested 
and its further use be provided against. But in a manner firm 
and self-regarding. Because some anarchist goes mad that 
is no reason why society should. One man's insanity is not 
cured by another becoming insane. The Indian Thug was 
far more dangerous than any enemies of order abroad now. 
The cord has gone in India, and the knife will follow in Europe. 
Public perturbation only inflates the assassin with self-impor- 
tance, and incites the emulation of the obscure. Furious 
epithets increase partisans by affording a species of spurious 
reason for serious retaliation. When Dynamitards arose, their 
operations were confined to futile alarms producing injury to 
unimportant persons only, when a young lord in the House of 
Commons accused them of want of courage to attack persons 
in high places. Everybody knows the response to that in- 
cautious jeer. We have seen a European emperor describe, in 
a telegram, the assailant of President McKinley as a "dastardly 
person." A dastard is a coward who is afraid of danger. Un- 
happily these assailants are not all cowards and these epithets 
incite them to show that they are not. They may be fiends — 
they may be execrable — but he who takes his life in his hands 
is not a dastard. This assailant was atrocious. He shot the 
President who extended the hand of courtesy and amity to him. 
A man who throws bombs, which bring death to the innocent 
also, from which he seeks to escape, is a dastard. 

Nevertheless, let the ministers of repression have discriminat- 
ing eyes. I have known men of real tenderness, of generosity 
and humanity, who had, notwithstanding, a sanguinary strain 
in their principles. Many in high places have it, as all who 
watch them, or read their utterances by speech or pen, well 
loiow. If they bring their sentiment into operation, they should 
be made to answer for it as well as the vulgar brute whose mind 
is murderous. There is a foolish praise of " thoroughness" (the 
fruitful source of many outrages) by persons who do not know 
that all principles have their limits. Thoroughness means the 
extermination of all obstacles in the way of a theory. Even 

XXX [ I I ] 



ANARCHISM 

thoroughness in good has it^pcrils. It is a maxim of experience 
that it takes half the time of the wise to correct and protect 
themselves from the errors of the good. 

Some years ago, when our Government were asked to enter 
into a European concert to repress anarchism, Mr. Gladstone 
asked me what I thought of such a step, saying his disinclina- 
tion to it was that the modes of procedure in some countries 
were such as would revolt the English people, and England, 
if it entered into the concert, would be committed to the approval 
and be understood to sanction whatever occurred. It was im- 
possible not to agree in this view. Every country has means 
of dealing with the evil in question if it has prudence and 
patience. Every anarchist is known to the police and in every 
group there is a spy or a fool. "What more can the police want ? 
The extinction of this evil lies in higher hands and other manners 
than theirs. 

The objection to government and lawful order is simply a 
reversion to the savage state. jMr. Auberon Herbert and the 
philosophers of absolute freedom cannot make anything else 
of it. The savage life is bold, brave, defiant, and full of original 
activities — but very inconvenient to others. Its ceaseless 
watchfulness, vicissitudes, and tragedies contain no time for 
progress. The irreconcilable philosopher who is out of it 
thinks he would be better in it. Let him try it. The oppor- 
tunity is open to him. There are savages of the purest type 
who will be glad to receive him — and eat him when meals run 
short. We always have persons among us devoid of appre- 
ciation of the advantages into which they were born — not know- 
ing what their forefathers suffered for want of them, or what it 
cost to obtain them. The philosophers who are against govern- 
ment do not realize what life is without it. Men may be too 
much governed — they often arc; but the remedy does not lie 
in the extreme of no government. Anarchic outrage is born 
of this impetuous oversight. The best of life does not consist 
of defiance. There is dignity in just obedience. There is 
noble pleasure in grateful or useful service. It is this sense 
which philosophical and proletarian anarchy alike lack. 

XXX [ 12 ] 



XXXI 

WAR 

"A DEMONSTRATION OF ITS FUTILITY " 

BY 

DAVID STARR JORDAN 

PRESIDENT OF LELAND STANFORD UNIVERSITY 

AND 

CARL SCHURZ 

FORMER UNITED STATES SENATOR 



TN our last address the celebrated Tolstoi insisted that war 
was murder. This, alas, comes so near to being terribly 
true that there have been jew wars indeed where it can be urged 
that both sides fought under pressure of necessity. In private 
life most of us, even if causelessly attacked, would go to great lengths 
of yielding and avoidance rather than assume the tremendous 
and tragic responsibility of destroyijig the life of the assailant. 
Yet the same one of us who thus recognizes the sanctity of human 
existence in the individual will cry out for war, for death in 
uncounted thousands, as heedlessly as if it were some childish 
game to be played for tops or kisses. We clamor that we will 
show the foe they "can't bluff us,'''' that we will "give them a good 
hiding, sir, and teach them who we aref^ Silly vanity and 
idle bluster! Are these the inspiring thoughts ivhich sanctify 
a thousand murders and make each glorious? Is this the spirit 
in which to raise the curtain upon a national tragedy? 

Yet there are not wanting those among us who seriously 
believe in war. It teaches courage, they say; and moreover, 
good as our own nation may be, other nations are so wicked 
we are forced to keep prepared and on guard. It is with these 
thoughts in view that many of us, unconsciously perhaps, have 
come to look on war as a vague, far-off necessity, not likely 
to affect us personally. Hence we neglect to meditate upon 
XXXI [ I ] 



WAR 

its moral turpUiide. War ^ only "helP^ to those who have 
lived and thought amid its horrors. And while many oj us 
may turn from it with vague distaste, there has been lacking in 
most minds the active motive for antagonism against it, which 
is here supplied by two of our most eminent citizens. 

David Starr Jordan, LL.D., the honored president of a 
great university, has long been one of the most powerful and 
impassioned of our pleaders against all war. This present 
address he delivered last spring at the Franklin centennial cele- 
bration in Philadelphia, and it is here printed with his approval. 
The name of Carl Schurz is too well known to need explana- 
tion. As editor of Harpcfs Weekly he wrote the accom- 
panying celebrated appeal in the days of popular excitement 
which preceded our Spanish war. This brilliant address has 
been often quoted in part. It is here reprinted in full by per- 
mission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers. Both articles deal 
with the subject calmly and practically, examining it by a 
method scientific rather than emotional. 

THE HUMAN HARVEST 

BY 

David Starr Jordan 

Science is wisdom set in order. It is known as science 
by its orderly arrangement, but above and beyond all matters 
of arrangement the wisdom itself must take rank. Wisdom 
is the essence of human experience, the contact of mind with the 
order of nature. Of all men of his time, Benjamin Franklin 
was preeminently a man of wisdom. By the same token 
the first leader in science in America, he still takes rank with 
the greatest. 

So in this time of heroic recognition, it is proper that a speaker 
of to-day should find his message in the words of Benjamin 
Franklin, and the message I choose is one for which this city 
of Philadelphia has always stood and from which it has taken 
its Greek name, the name which in classical phrase says with 
a single word that men arc brothers worthy of our love. It 

XXXI [ 2 ] 



WAR 

is a message for which the State of Pennsylvania has ahvays 
stood, for the same principle was embodied in the life of William 
Penn. This has always been a Quaker City, and the Quakers, 
the Friends, have been our best apostles of the gospel of "peace 
on earth, good will towards men," the culmination of social 
and political wisdom. 

Benjamin Franklin once said, "All war is bad; some wars 
worse than others." Then, once again, in more explicit terms, 
referring to the dark shadow of war cast over scenes of peace, 
the evil of the standing army, Franklin said to Baynes : 

"If one power singly were to reduce its standing army 
it would be instantly overrun by other nations. Yet I think 
there is one effect of a standing army which must in time be 
felt so as to bring about the abolition of the system. A standing 
army not only diminishes the population of a country, but even 
the size and breed of the human species. For an army is the 
flower of the nation. All the most vigorous, stout, and well- 
made men in a kingdom arc to be found in the army, and these 
men in general cannot marry." ^ 

What is true of standing armies is far more true of armies 
that fight and fall; for, as Franklin said again, "Wars are not 
paid for in war times: the bill comes later." 

In the discussion of the principles involved in Franklin's 
words, I must lay before you four fragments of history, three 
stories told because they are true, and one parable not true, 
but told for the lesson it teaches. And this is the first: Once 
there was a man, strong, wealthy, and patient, who dreamed of a 
finer type of horse than had ever yet existed. This horse should 
be handsome, clean limbed, intelligent, docile, strong, and swift. 
These traits were to be not those of one horse alone, a member 
of a favored equine aristocracy; they were to be "bred in the 
bone" so that they would continue from generation to generation, 
the attributes of a special common type of horse. And with 
this dream ever before his waking eyes, he invoked for his aid 
the four twin genii of organic life, the four by which all the 
magic of transformism of species has been accomplished either 
in nature or in art. And these forces once in his service, he 
1 Parton's "Life of Franklin," II, p. 572. 
XXXI [ 3 ] 



WAR 

left to their control all tho^kins included in his great ambition. 
These four genii or fates are not strangers to us, nor were they 
new to the human race. Being so great and so strong, they arc 
invisible to all save those who seek them. Men who deal with 
them after the fashion of science give theni commonplace 
names: variation, heredity, segregation, selection. 

Because not all horses are alike, because in fact no two were 
ever quite the same, the first appeal was made to the genius 
of Variation. Looking over the world of horses, he found to 
his hand Kentucky race-horses, clean limbed, handsome, and 
fleet, some more so and others less. So those which had the 
most of the virtues of the horse which was to be were chosen 
to be blended in new creation. Then again, he found thorough- 
bred horses of Arabian stock, hardy and strong and intelligent. 
These virtues were needed in the production of the perfect 
horse. And here came the need of the second genius, who is 
called Heredity. With the crossing of the racer with the thor- 
oughbred, all qualities of both were blended in the progeny. 
The next generation partook of all desirable traits and again 
of undesirable ones as well. Some the one, and some the 
other, for sire and dam alike had given the stamp of its own 
kind and for the most part in equal degree. But again never 
in a degree quite equal, and in some measure these matters 
varied with each sire and each dam, and with each colt of all 
their progeny. It was found that the progeny of the mare 
called Beautiful Bells excelled all others in retaining all that 
was good in line horses and in rejecting all that a noble horse 
should not have. And like virtues were attached to the sires 
called Palo Alto, Electricity, and Electioneer. 

But there were horses and horses ; horses not of the chosen 
breed, and should these enter the fold with their common blood, 
it would endanger all that had been already accomplished. 
For the ideal horse mating with the common horse controls 
at the best but half the traits of the progeny. If the strain 
were to be established, the vulgar horseflesh must be kept away, 
and only the best remain in association with the best. Thus 
Segregation, the third of the genii, was called into service lest 
the successes of this herd be lost in the failure of some other. 
XXXI [ 4 ] 



WAR 

Under the spell of Heredity all the horses partook of the 
charm of Beautiful Bells and of Electricity and of Palo Alto, 
for firmly and persistently all others were banished from their 
presence. There were some who were not strong, some who 
were not sleek, some who were not fleet, some who were not 
clean-limbed, nor docile, nor intelligent. At least, they were 
not so to the degree which the dream of fair horses demanded. 
By the force of Selection, all such were sent away. Variation 
was always at work making one colt unlike another; Heredity 
made each colt a blend or mosaic of traits of sire and of grand- 
sires and granddams; Selection left only good traits to form 
this mosaic, and the grandsire and granddam, sire and dam, and 
the rest of the ancestry lived their lives again in the expanding 
circle of descent. 

Thus in the final result, the horses who were left were the 
horses of their owner's dream. The future of the breed was 
fixed, and fixed at the beginning by the very framing of the 
conditions under which it lived. It is variation which gives 
better as well as worse. It is heredity which saves all that has 
been attained — for better or for worse. It is selection by which 
better triumphs over worse, and it is segregation which protects 
the final result from falling again into the grasp of the general 
average. In all this, selection is the vital, moving, changing 
force. It throws the shaping of the future on the individual 
chosen by the present. The horse who is left marks the future 
of his kind. The history of the steed is an elongation of the 
history of those who are chosen for parentage. And with the 
best of the best chosen for parentage, the best of the best 
appears in the progeny. The horse-harvest is good in each 
generation. As the seed we sow, so shall we reap. 

And this story is true, known to thousands of men. And 
it will be true again just as often as men may try to carry it into 
experiment. And it will be true not of horses alone, for the 
four fates which guide and guard life have no partiality for 
horses but work just as persistently for cattle or sheep, or plums 
or roses, or calla or cactus, as they do for horses or for men. 
From the very beginning of life they have wrought untiringly — 
and in your life and in mine — in the grass of the field, the trees 
XXXI [ 5 ] 



WAR 

of the forest — in bird ancWRast, everywhere we find the traces 
of their energy. 

And this brings me to my second story, which is not true as 
history, but only in its way as parable. 

There was once a man — strenuous no doubt, but not wise, 
for he did not give heed to the real nature of things and so he 
set himself to do by his own unaided hand the work which only 
the genii can accomplish. And this man possessed also a stud 
of horses. They were docile, clean-limbed, fleet, and strong, 
and he would make them still more strong and swift. So he 
rode them swiftly with all his might — day and night, always on 
the course, always pushed to the utmost, leaving only the dull 
and sluggish to remain in the stalls. For it was his dream to 
fill these horses with the spirit of action, with the glory of swift 
motion, that this glory might be carried on and on to the last 
generation of horses. There were some who could not keep 
the pace, and to these and these alone he assigned the burden 
of bearing colts. And the feeble and the broken, the dull of 
wit, the coarse of limb, became each year the mothers of the colts. 
The horses who were chosen for the race-course he trained with 
every care, and every stroke of discipline showed itself in the 
flashing eyes and straining muscles — such were the best horses. 
But the other horses wxre the horses who were left. From 
their loins came the next generation and with these then was 
less fire and less speed than the first horses possessed in such 
large measure. But still the rush went on — whip and spur 
made good the lack of native movement. The racers still 
pushed on the course, while in the stall and paddocks at home 
the dull and common horses bore their dull and common colts. 
Variation was still at work with these as patiently as ever. 
Heredity followed, repeating faithfully whatever was left to 
her. Segregation, always conservative, guarded her own, but 
could not make good the deficiencies. Selection, forced to 
act perversely, chose for the future the worst and not the best, 
as was her usual fashion. So the current of life ran steadily 
downward. The herd was degenerating because it was each 
year an inferior herd which bred. Each generation yielded 
weaker colts, rougher, duller, clumsier colts, and no amount 
XXXI [ 6 ] 



WAR 

of training or lash or whip or spur made any permanent differ- 
ence for the better. The horse harvest was bad. Thorough- 
bred and race-horse gave place to common beasts, for in the 
removal of the noble the ignoble always finds its opportunity. 
It is always the horse that remains which determines the future 
of the stud. 

In like fashion from the man who is left flows the current of 
human histor}\ 

This tale then is a parable, a story of what never was, but 
which is always trying to become true. 

Once there was a great king — and the nation over which 
he bore rule lay on the flanks of a mountain range, spreading 
across fair hills and valleys green and fertile, across to the Med- 
iterranean Sea. And the men of his race, fair and strong, 
self-reliant and self-confident, men of courage and men of action, 
were men "who knew no want they could not fill for them- 
selves." They knew none on whom they looked down, and 
none to whom they regarded themselves inferior. And for 
all things which men could accomplish these ploughmen of the 
Tiber and the Apennines felt themselves fully competent and 
adequate. "Vir," they called themselves in their own tongue, 
and virile, virilis, men like them are called to this day. It was 
the weakling and the slave who was crowded to the wall; the 
man of courage begat descendants. In each generation and 
from generation to generation the human harvest was good. 
And the great wise king who ruled them — but here my story 
halts, for there was no king. There could be none. For it 
was written, men fit to be called men, men who are Vires, 
"are too self-willed, too independent, and too self-cultured 
to be ruled by anybody but themselves." Kings are for weak- 
lings, not for men. Men free-born control their own destinies. 
"The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are under- 
lings." For it was later said of these same days: "there was a 
Brutus once, who would have brooked the Eternal Devil to 
take his scat in Rome, as easily as a king " And so there was 
no king to cherish and control these men and his subjects. The 
spirit of freedom was the only ruler they knew, and this spirit 
being herself metaphoric called to her aid the four great genii 
XXXI [ 7 ] 



WAR 

which create and recrcatc^tions. Variation was ever at work, 
while heredity held fast all that she developed. Segregation in 
her mountain fastnesses held the world away, and selection chose 
the best and for the best purposes, casting aside the weakly, 
and the slave, holding the man for the man's work, and ever 
the man's work was at home, building the cities, subduing the 
forests, draining the marshes, adjusting the customs and 
statutes, preparing for the new generations. So the men begat 
sons of men after their own fashion, and the men of strength 
and courage were ever dominant. The Spirit of Freedom was 
a wise master, cares wisely for all that he controls. 

So in the early days, when Romans were men, when Rome 
was small, without glory, without riches, without colonies and 
without slaves, these were the days of Roman greatness. 

Then the Spirit of Freedom little by little gave way to the 
Spirit of Domination. Conscious of power, men sought to 
exercise it, not on themselves but on one another. Little by 
little, this meant banding together, aggression, suppression, 
plunder, struggle, glory, and all that goes with the pomp and 
circumstance of war. The individuality of men was lost in 
the aggrandizement of the few. Independence was swallowed 
up in ambition, patriotism came to have a new meaning. It 
was transferred from the hearth and home to the trail of the 
army. 

It does not matter to us now what were the details of 
the subsequent history of Rome. We have now to consider 
only a single factor In science, this factor is known as "rever- 
sal of selection." "Send forth the best ye breed!" That 
was the word of the Roman war-call. And the Spirit of Domi- 
nation took these words literally, and the best were sent forth. 
In the conquests of Rome, Vir, the real man, went forth to battle 
and to the work of foreign invasion; Homo, the human being, 
remained in the farm and the workshop and begat the new 
generations. Thus "Vir gave place to Homo." The sons of 
real men gave place to the sons of scullions, stable-boys, slaves, 
camp followers, and the riff-raff of those the great victorious 
army does not want. 

The fall of Rome was not due to luxury, effeminacy, cor- 
XXXI [ 8 ] 



WAR 

ruption, the wickedness of Nero and Caligula, the weakness 
of the train of Constantine's worthless descendants. It was 
fixed at Philippi, when the spirit of domination was victorious 
over the spirit of freedom. It was fixed still earlier, in the rise 
of consuls and triumvirates and the fall of the simple, sturdy, 
self-sufficient race who would brook no arbitrary ruler. When 
the real men fell in war, or were left in far-away colonies, the life 
of Rome still went on. But it was a different type of Roman 
which continued it, and this new type repeated in Roman 
history its weakling parentage. 

"It is puerile," says Charles Ferguson, "to suppose that 
kingdoms are made by kings. The kijigs could do nothing if 
the mob did not throw up its cap when the king rides by. The 
king is consented to by the mob, because of that in him which 
is mob-like. The mob loves glory and prizes, so does the king. 
If he loved beauty and justice, the mob would shout for him 
while the fine words were sounding in the air, but he could 
never celebrate a jubilee or establish a dynasty. When the 
crowd gets ready to demand justice and beauty, it becomes 
a democracy and has done with kings." 

Thus we read in Roman history the rise of the mob and of 
the emperor who is the mob's exponent. It is not the presence 
of the emperor which makes imperialism. It is the absence 
of the people, the want of men. Babies in their day have been 
emperors. A wooden image would serve the same purpose. 
More than once it has served it. The decline of a people can 
have but one cause, the decline in the type from which it draws 
its sires. A herd of cattle can degenerate in no other way than 
this, and a race of men is under the same laws. By the rise 
in absolute power, as a sort of historical barometer, we may 
mark the decline in the breed of the people. We see this in the 
history of Rome. The conditional power of Julius Caesar, 
resting on his own tremendous personality, showed that the 
days were past of Cincinnatus and of Junius Brutus. The 
power of Augustus showed the same. But the decline went on. 
It is written that "the little finger of Constantine was thicker 
than the loins of Augustus/'' The emperor in the time of 
Claudius and Caligula was not the strong man who held in 
XXXI [ 9 ] 



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check all lesser men anc^rganizations. He was the creature 
of the iiiob, and the mob, intoxicated with its own work, wor- 
shipped him as divine. Doubtless the last emperor, Augustulus 
Romulus, before he was thrown into the scrap heap of history, 
was regarded in the mob's eyes and his own as the most godlike 
of them all. 

What have the historians to say of these matters? Very 
few have grasped the full significance of their own words, 
for very few have looked on men as organisms, and on nations 
as dependent on the specific character of the organisms destined 
for their reproduction. 

So far as I know, Benjamin Franklin was the first to think 
of man thus as an inhabitant, a species in nature among other 
species and dependent on nature's forces as other animals 
and other inhabitants must be. 

In Otto Seeck's great history of "The Downfall of the 
Ancient World" (Der Untcrgang der Antiken Welt), he finds 
this downfall due solely to the rooting out of the best ("Die 
Ausrottung der Besten"). The historian of the "Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire" or any other empire is engaged 
solely with the details of the process by which the best men are 
exterminated. Speaking of Greece, Dr. Seeck says, "A wealth 
of force of spirit went down in the suicidal wars." "In Rome, 
Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thou- 
sands. Sulla destroyed the democrats, and not less thoroughly. 
Whatever of strong blood survived, fell as an offering to the 
proscription of the Triumvirate." "The Romans had less of 
spontaneous force to lose than the Greeks. Thus desolation 
came to them sooner. Whoever was bold enough to rise 
politically in Rome was almost without exception thrown to 
the ground. Only cowards remained and from their brood 
came forward the new generations. Cowardice showed itself 
in lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and 
traditions." 

The Romans of the republic could not have made the his- 
toiy of the Roman empire. In their hands it would have been 
still a republic. Could they have held aloof from world-con- 
quering schemes, Rome might have remained a republic, en- 
XXXI [id] 



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during even to our own day. The seeds of destruction lie not 
in the race nor in the form of government, but in the influences 
by which the best men are cut off from the work of parenthood. 

"The Roman empire," says Seeley, "perished for want of 
men." The dire scarcity of men is noted even by Julius Caesar. 
And at the same time it is noted that there are men enough. 
Rome was filling up like an overflowing marsh. Men of a 
certain type were plenty, "people with guano in their com- 
position," to use Emerson's striking phrase, but the self-reliant 
farmers, the hardy dwellers on the flanks of the Apennines, 
the Roman men of the early Roman days, these were fast going, 
and with the change in the breed came the change in Roman 
history. 

"The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries had been 
the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hard- 
ships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the popu- 
lation that lined the Apennines." 

With the Antonines came "a period of sterility and barren- 
ness in human beings." " The human harvest was bad." 
Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised 
against race suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty 
which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to dis- 
charge." Wars were conducted in the face of a declining 
birth rate, and this decline in quality and quantity of the human 
harvest engaged very early the attention of the wise men of 
Rome. 

"The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small 
farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did 
not serve in the army multiplied" (Bury). 

Thus " Vir gave place to Homo," real men to mere human 
beings. There were always men enough, such as they were. 
"A hencoop will be filled, whatever the (original) number of 
hens," said Benjamin Franklin. And thus the mob filled Rome. 
No wonder the mob leader, the mob hero rose in relative im- 
portance. No wonder "the little finger of Constantine was 
thicker than the loins of Augustus." No wonder that "if 
Tiberius chastised his subjects with whips, Valentinian chas- 
tised them with scorpions." 

XXXI [ II ] 



WAR 

"Government, having i^sumed godhead, took at the same 
time the appurtenances ot it. Officials midtiphed. Subjects 
lost their rights. Al^ject fear paralyzed the people and those 
that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty." "The 
worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine." 
The emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force 
over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to 
reason or eloquence, w'hich had no patriotism because it had no 
countr)', which had no humanity because it had no domestic 
ties." "There runs through Roman literature a brigand 'sand 
barbarian's contempt for honest industry." "Roman civiliza- 
tion was not a creative kind, it was military; that is, destruc- 
tive." What was the end of it all ? The nation bred real men 
no more. To cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were 
borrowed." The man of the quick eye and the strong arm 
gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, the man with 
the hoe, the man whose lot does not change because in him 
there lies no power to change it. "Slaves have wrongs, but 
freemen alone have rights." So at the end the Roman world 
yielded to the barbaric, because it was weaker in force. "The 
barbarians settled and peopled the barbaric rather than con- 
quered it." And the process is recorded in history as the fall 
of Rome. 

"Out of every hundred thousand strong men, eighty thou- 
sand were slain. Out of every hundred thousand weaklings, 
ninety to ninety-five thousand were left to survive." This is 
Dr. Seeck's calculation, and the biological significance of such 
mathematics must be evident at once. Dr. Secck speaks 
with scorn of the idea that Rome fell from the decay of old 
age, from the corruption of luxury, from neglect of military 
tactics or from the over-diffusion of culture. 

"It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered 
from over-culture." "In condemning the sinful luxury of 
wealthy Romans, we forget that the trade lords of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this regard to 
Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting 
the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which these 
men belonged. The people who lived in luxury in Rome 
XXXI [ 12 ] 



WAR 

were scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. 
The masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because 
they could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force 
of untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury 
of a few hundreds?" 

"Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble 
as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman empire 
was made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or Roman 
culture." 

"Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, 
the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced 
is a physical, not a moral, decay. In valor, discipline, and science 
the Roman armies remained what they had always been and 
the peasant emperors of Illyricum were worthy successors of 
Cincinnatus and Caius Marius. But the problem was, how 
to replenish those armies. Men were wanting. The empire 
perished for want of men" (Seeley). 

Does history ever repeat itself? It always does if it is true 
history. If it docs not we are dealing not with history but 
with mere succession of incidents. Like causes produce like ef- 
fects, just as often as man may choose to test them. Whenever 
men use a nation for the test, poor seed yields a poor fruition. 
Where the weakling and the coward survives in human history, 
there " the human harvest is bad," and it can never be otherwise. 

The finest Roman province, a leader in the Roman world, 
was her colony of Hispania. What of Spain in history ? What 
of Spain to-day? "This is Castile," said a Spanish writer, 
" she makes men and wastes them." " This sublime and terrible 
phrase," says another writer, "sums up Spanish history," 

In 1630, according to Captain Calkins, the Augustinian 
friar, La Puente, thus summed up the fate of Spain: 

"Against the credit for redeemed souls, I set the cost of 
armadas and the sacrifice of soldiers and friars sent to the Phil- 
ippines. And this I count the chief loss: for mines give silver 
and forests give timber, but only Spain gives Spaniards, and 
she may give so many that she may be left desolate and con- 
strained to bring up strangers' children instead of her own." 

Another of the noblest of Roman provinces was Gallia, the 
XXXI [ 13 ] 



WAR 

favored land, in which^e best of the Romans, the Franks, 
and the Northmen have mingled their blood to produce a nation 
of men, hopefully leaders in the arts of peace, fatally leaders 
also in the arts of war. 

To-day we are told by Frenchmen that France is a decadent 
nation. This is a confession of judgment, not an accusation 
of hostile rivals. It does not mean that the slums of Paris 
arc destructive of human life. That we know elsewhere. 
Each great city has its great burdens, and these fall hard on 
those at the bottom of the layers of society. There is degrada- 
tion in all great cities, but the great cities are not the whole of 
France. It is claimed that the decadence is deep-seated, 
not individual. It is said that the birth rate is steadily falling, 
that the average stature of men is lower by two inches at least 
than it was a century ago, that the physical force is less among 
the peasants at their homes. Legoyt tells us that "it will take 
long periods of peace and plenty before France can recover 
the tall statures mowed down in the wars of the republic and 
the first empire." What is the cause of all this? Intem- 
perance, vice, misdirected education, bureaucracy, and the 
rush toward ready-made careers? These may be symptoms. 
They are not causes. Demolins asks in that clever volume 
of his: "In what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo- 
Saxon?" Before we answer this, let us inquire in what consti- 
tutes the inferiority of the Latin races. If we admit this 
inferiority exists in any degree, and if we answer it in any 
degree, we find in the background the causes of the fall of 
Greece, the fall of Rome, the fall of Spain. We find the spirit 
of domination, the spirit of glory^, the spirit of war, the final 
survival of subserviency, of cowardice, and of sterility. The 
man who is left holds in his grasp the histoiy of the future. The 
evolution of a race is always selective, never collective. Col- 
lective evolution among men or beasts, the movement upward or 
downward of the whole as a whole, irrespective of training or 
selection does not exist. As Lcpouge has said, "It exists in 
rhetoric, not in truth nor in history." 

The survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is 
the primal moving cause of race progress and of race changes. 
XXXI [ 14 ] 



WAR 

In the red stress of human history, this natural process of selec- 
tion is sometimes reversed. A reversal of selection is the be- 
ginning of degradation. It is degradation itself- Can we see 
the fall of Rome in the downfall of France ? Let us look again 
at the history. A single short part of it will be enough. It 
will give us the clew to the rest. 

In the Wiertz gallery in Brussels is a wonderful painting, 
dating from the time of Waterloo, called Napoleon in Hell. 
It represents the great marshal with folded arms and face 
unmoved descending slowly to the land of the shades. Before 
him, filling all the background of the picture with every expres- 
sion of countenance, are the men sent before him by the unbridled 
ambition of Napoleon. Three millions and seventy thousand 
there were in all — so history tells us, more than half of them 
Frenchmen. They are not all shown in one picture. They are 
only hinted at. And behind the millions shown or hinted at are 
the millions on millions of men who might have been and are 
not— the huge widening human wedge of the possible descend- 
ants of the men who fell in battle. These men of Napoleon's 
armies were the youth without blemish, "the best that the na- 
tion could bring," chosen as "food for powder," "ere evening 
to be trampled like the grass," in the rush of Napoleon's great 
battles. These men came from the plough, from the work shop, 
from the school, the best there were— those from eighteen to 
thirty-five years of age at first, but afterward the older and the 
younger. "A boy will stop a bullet as well as a man"; this 
maxim is accredited to Napoleon. "The more vigorous and 
well born a young man is," says Novicow, "the more normally 
constituted, the greater his chance to be slain by musket or 
magazine, the rifled cannon and other similar engines of civiliza- 
tion." Among those destroyed by Napoleon were "the elite 
of Europe." "Napoleon," says Otto Seeck, "in a series of 
years seized all the youth of high stature and left them scattered 
over many battlefields, so that the French people who followed 
them are mostly men of smaller stature. More than once 
in France since Napoleon's time has the military limit been 
lowered." 

I need not tell again the story of Napoleon's campaigns. It 
XXXI [ 15 ] 



WAR 

began with the United |jpttes, the justice and helpfulness of 
the Code Napoleon, the prowess of the brave lieutenant whose 
military skill and intrepidity had caused him to deserve well of 
his nation. 

The spirit of freedom gave way to the spirit of domination. 
The path of gloiy is one which descends easily. Campaign 
followed campaign, against enemies, against neutrals, against 
friends. The trail of glory crossed the Alps to Italy and to 
Egypt, crossed Switzerland to Austria, crossed Germany to 
Russia. Conscription followed victory, and victory and con- 
scription debased the human species. " The human harvest 
was bad.'' The First Consul became the Emperor. The servant 
of the people became the founder of the dynasty. Again con- 
scription after conscription. "Let them die wdth arms in their 
hands. Their death is glorious, and it wall be avenged. You 
can always fill the places of soldiers." These were Napoleon's 
w^ords when Dupont surrendered his army in Spain to save 
the lives of a doomed battalion. 

More conscription. After the battle of Wagram, we are 
told, the French began to feel their weakness; the Grand 
Army was not the army which fought at Ulm and Jena. " Raw 
conscripts raised before their time and hurriedly drafted into 
the line had impaired its steadiness." 

On to Moscow,* "amidst ever-deepening misery they 
struggled on, until of the 600,000 men who had proudly crossed 
the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, 
frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of 
Korno in the middle of December." 

" Despite the loss of the most splendid army marshalled 
by man. Napoleon abated no whit of his resolve to dominate 
Germany and discipline Russia." " . . . He strained every 
effort to call the youth of the empire to arms . . . and 350,000 
conscripts were promised by the Senate. The mighty swirl 
of the Moscow campaign sucked in 150,000 lads of under 
twenty years of age into the devouring vortex." "The peasan- 
try gave up their sons as food for cannon." But "many were 

^These quotations are from the "History of Napoleon I," by J. H. 
Rose. 

XXXI [ 16 ] 



WAR 

appalled at the frightful drain on the nation's strength." "In 
less than half a year after the loss of half a million men a new 
army nearly as numerous was marshalled under the imperial 
eagles. But the majority were young, untrained troops, and 
it was remarked that the conscripts born in the year of Terror 
had not the stamina of the earlier levies. Brave they were, 
superbly brave, and the Emperor sought by every means to 
breathe into them his indomitable spirit." "Truly the Emperor 
could make boys heroes, but he could never repair the losses 
of 1812." " Soldiers were wanting, youths were dragged forth." 
The human harvest was at its very worst. 

And the sequel of it all is the decadence of France. In the 
presence of war — of war on such a mighty, ruthless, and ruinous 
scale — one does not have to look far to fmd in what constitutes 
the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. And we see the truth in 
Franklin's words, the deeper truth of their deeper wisdom: 
"Men do not pay for war in war time; the bill comes later." 

Another wise man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, has used these 
words: "Man has but one future, and that is predetermined 
in his lobes." "All the privilege and all the legislation in the 
world cannot meddle or help. How shall a man escape from 
his ancestors or draw off from his veins the black drop?" 

It is related that Guizot once asked this question of James 
Russell Lowell: "How long will the republic endure?" "So 
long as the ideas of its founders remain dominant," Was the 
answer. But again we have the question: " How long will the 
ideas of its founders remain dominant?" Just so long as the 
blood of the founders remains dominant in the blood of its 
people. Not necessarily the blood of the Puritans and the Vir- 
ginians alone, the original creators of the land of free states. 
We must not read our history so narrowly as that. It is the 
blood of free-born men, be they Roman, Frank, Saxon, Nor- 
man, Dane, Goth, or Samurai. It is a free stock which creates 
a free nation. Our republic shall endure so long as the human 
harvest is good, so long as the movement of history, the progress 
of peace and industry leaves for the future not the worst but 
the best of each generation. The republic of Rome lasted so 
long as there were Romans, the republic of America will last 
XXXI [ 17 ] 



WAR 

so long as its people, in mood and in spirit, remain what we 
have learned to call Americans. 

By the law of probabilities as developed by Quetelet, there 
will appear in each generation the same number of potential 
poets, artists, investigators, patriots, atliletes, and superior men 
of each degree. 

But this law involves the theory of continuity of paternity, 
that in each generation a percentage practically equal of men 
of superior force or superior mentality should survive to take 
the responsibilities of parenthood. Otherwise Quetelet's law 
becomes subject to the operation of another law, the operation 
of reversed selection, or the biological "law of diminishing 
returns." In other words, breeding from an inferior stock 
is the sole agency in race degeneration, as selection, natural 
or artificial along one line or another, is the sole agency in race 
progress. 

And all laws of probabilities and of averages are subject 
to a still higher law, the primal law of biology, which no cross- 
current of life can overrule or modify: Like the seed is the 
harvest. 

ABOUT WAR 

BY 

Carl Schurz 

Let us imagine the first news of the destruction of the 
"Maine "in the harbor of Havana had been accompanied by clear 
proof that the catastrophe was caused by a torpedo or a mine 
— what would have been the duty of our Government ? Would 
it have been to rush forthwith into a war with Spain upon the 
assumption that Spanish officials and, with them, the Span- 
ish Government were responsible for the calamity ? Or would 
it not rather have been to inquire whether Spanish officials 
were really responsible, and, if they were found to be, whether 
the Spanish Government were willing or not to make due atone- 
ment for the acts of its agents ? What man of good sense and 
of sound moral instincts would wish that war be resorted to 
while an honorable adjustment seems attainable? And yet 
XXXI [ i8 ] 



WAR 

a resort to war is on every possible occasion spoken of, not 
only by the miscreants with whom the stirring up of a war 
excitement is a mere business speculation, but even by other- 
wise rational and respectable persons, with a flippancy as if 
war were nothing more serious than an international yacht 
race or a football-match. 

That war has in the histoiy of mankind sometimes served 
good purposes in forming nations, in repressing barbarism, 
in enforcing justice, in removing obstructions to the spread of 
civilization, ^^ ill hardly be denied by anybody. How much of 
such work is still to be done, and how far the instrumentality 
of war may still be required to that end, it is needless to discuss 
here. In any event, it will be admitted that whatever object 
is to be accomplished, war is to be regarded as the last expedient 
to be resorted to, and not the first. 

What does civilization mean if not the progress from the 
arbitrament of brute force to the arbitrament of reason and the 
maintenance of justice by peaceable methods in the righting 
of wrongs, and in the settlement of conflicting opinions or 
interests? If it were proposed to abolish our courts, and to 
remand the decision of difficulties between man and man to 
trial by single combat, or by street fight between armed bands 
enlisted by the contending parties, it would be called a relapse 
into barbarism too absurd as well as too dreadful to be thought 
of. We denounce the application of lynch law as a practice 
utterly repugnant to the fundamental principles of civilized 
life, and as a blot upon the character of a civilized people. 
What a strange anachronism it is that, while we abhor the ar- 
bitrary resort to brute force in private life as a crime against 
human society, the same arbitrary resort to brute force in decid- 
ing differences between nation and nation, although infinitely 
more horrible in its effects, has still remained the custom of 
the civilized world, and is surrounded with a halo of heroic 
romance! It may, indeed, be said that it is far more difficult 
to find and institute practical methods for the peaceable ad- 
justment of some kinds of disputes between nations than be- 
tween individuals, so that occasionally war remains the only 
expedient. This is true, just as it is true that occasionally 
XXXI [ 19 ] 



WAR 

the social order may bd^mc so disturbed that the individual 
man has no refuge for the protection of his rights except in self- 
help outside of the rule of law. But in each case this should 
be regarded only as the very last extremity when everything 
else fails. 

General Sherman once said: "You would know what 
war is? War is hell." He knew what he was speaking of, and 
he meant it. Was it an exaggeration ? When the news of the 
destruction of the " Maine " arrived we threw up our hands in 
horror. Two hundred and fifty men killed by the explosion! 
What a frightful calamity! Thus we feel, and thus we speak, 
in a state of peace. How in time of war? Two hundred and 
fifty men killed? Only a skirmish, a slight brush with the 
enemy. Nothing of importance. A pitched battle comes. 
Five thousand killed and fifteen thousand wounded on our 
side ; the loss of the enemy believed to be greater. A hard fight, 
but, perhaps, not decisive. Then more battles; more thousands 
of killed, more tens of thousands of w^ounded; the hospitals 
crowded with countless multitudes of sick. Naval fights also; 
of those mysterious monsters called battleships some go to the 
bottom of the sea, some of our own as well as some of the enemy's. 
How many men perish with them? Two hundred and fifty? 
A mere trifle. It must be many times two hundred and fifty 
to make a sensation. What is then our first thought? The 
gaps must be filled, and more of our young men are sent to the 
front and upon the ships. And the crov/ds of parents made 
childless, and of widows and orphans! "Well, very sad, but 
war is war. Let us take care of them the best way we can to 
keep them from starving." But more than this. Wherever 
the armies operate, devastation, ravage, and ruin; wherever 
the warships sail, destruction of commerce and mutual havoc 
— the fruit of years of patient industiy and exertion ruthlessly 
wiped out; and those agencies of intercourse and mutual ad- 
vancement by which modern civilization has made the nations 
of the world dependent upon one another disastrously inter- 
rupted, and loss, desolation, and misery spread broadcast. 
Was General Sherman wrong when he said that "war is hell" ? 

But we are told that a nation needs a war from time to 
XXXI [ 20 ] 



WAR 

time to prevent it from becoming effeminate, to shake it up 
from demoralizing materialism, and to elevate the popular 
heart by awakening heroic emotions and the spirit of patriotic 
self-sacrifice. This has a captivating sound. But is there 
not something intensely ludicrous in the idea that the American 
people, while the rugged work of subduing this vast continent 
to civilization is yet unfinished, need wars to save them from 
effeminacy ? Were we more effeminate before our Civil War 
than we have been since ? As to the demoralizing materialism, 
was the pursuit of money, the greed of material possession and 
enjoyment, less prevalent after the Civil War than before it ? 
Did not the war itself stimulate that "materialism" to a degree 
not known among us before? As to heroic emotions and the 
spirit of patriotic self-sacrifice, it is true that war is apt to call 
forth splendid manifestations of them. But does war create 
those noble impulses? Could it bring out the manifestations 
of them if they did not, although unmanifestcd, already exist? 
And is, after all, the readiness to die for one's country the sum 
of all bravery ? Is there no call for heroic emotions and patriotic 
self-sacrifice in a state of peace ? Is not a patient and faithful 
struggle for the truth against the fanaticism of prejudice, and 
for justice against arrogant power, as brave a feat as the 
storming of a battery? And is not that civic virtue more 
rare than the physical courage of the soldier, and, on the 
whole, more needful to the republic ? On the other hand, 
while war calls forth demonstrations of heroic spirit, does it 
not also stimulate the baser passions of a larger number? 
Have we ever heard of a war wdiich, whatever great objects 
it may otherwise have served, improved private or public 
morals or stimulated the cultivation of those quiet and un- 
ostentatious civic virtues which arc l^iost needful to the vitahty 
of free government? 

But we are told that there are things worse than war. No 
doubt. Loss of honor and self-respect, for instance. Surely 
we should not tamely accept a deliberate insult; but neither 
should we by offensive bluster provoke one. We should preserve 
our self-respect, but also respect the self-respect of others. 
We should not submit to manifest wTong, but we should not 

XXXI [ 21 ] 



WAR 

forget that others too ha^ffights ; and we must not see a wrong 
irremediable, except by war, in every difference of opinion or 
clash of interest. Whenever the question of redress or remedy 
is to be settled, we should not forget that "war is hell," and 
that a war honorably averted is a nobler achievement than 
a battle won. 

But will not this horror of war at last make cringing 
cowards of us all ? No danger of that. Whatever our love of 
peace, when the republic needs defenders, hundreds of thou- 
sands of her sons will eagerly rush to arms, and the people will 
pour forth their wealth without stint, no matter if "war is hell." 
Of this there will never be doubt. No peace feeling can emas- 
culate our patriotism. The danger lies in the opposite direction. 
It is that the popular mind may too easily forget that war is 
justifiable only when all resources of statesmanship to avert 
it have been exhausted, and when the true value of the object 
to be accomplished through it outweighs the blood and loss of 
wealth and human misery and demoralization it will cost. 
This being the temper of a high-spirited people, so much more 
do the fiends who seek to drive the nation into unnecessary 
war by false reports or by unscrupulous appeals to prejudice 
and passion deserve to be execrated by all good men, and so 
much more gratitude is due to those in power who, firmly 
resisting the screams of a reckless demagogy, know no higher 
duty than to spare the people the scourge of war so long as the 
blessing of peace can honorably be preserved. 



XXXI [ 22 ] 



XXXII 



ARBITRATION 

"A LEAGUE OF PEACE" 

BY 

ANDREW CARNEGIE, LL.D. 

LORD RECTOR OF ST. ANDREW'S UNIVERSITY 



TF war he indeed, as both President Jordan and Mr. Sch^rz 
have urged upon us, an economic blunder as well as a 
crime, a costly jolly at its best, and brutal murder at its worst, 
what chance is there that we may escape it wholly, that some 
day it may become, as slavery and darker nameless evils have 
become, a crudity of the barbaric past, the last outgrown relic 
of the ape-man, luhose very existence depended on the fierceness 
of tooth and claw? We have all heard more or less doubtfully 
and dubiously of recent peace congresses, most of us with little 
hope of their achieving practical results. No busy man has 
read or heard all the eloquent speeches delivered at all the sessions 
of this kind. But let us take one only of these, the practical 
outlook of an eminently practical man. When recently the 
University of St. Andrew's in his native Scotland conferred on 
Mr. Carnegie the high honor of re-electing him its Rector, he 
chose the occasion of his inaugural, when he knew that all the 
world would be listening and intent, he chose that occasion to 
explain fully the practical outlook of what he hoped might be 
achieved toward universal peace. We deal here, therefore, with 
no vague theories, no flights of poetic fancy, hit with earnest, 
simple truth. For all ivho would know what peace congresses 
really mean, the address is worth studying. 
XXXII [ I ] 



ARBITRATION 

Principal and Stnd(^K oj St. Andrew'' s: My first words 
must be words of thanks, very grateful thanks, to those who 
have so kindly re-elected me their Rector without a contest. 
The honor is deeply appreciated, I assure you. There is one 
feature, at least, connected with your choice upon which I 
may venture to congratulate you, and also the university — 
the continuance of the services of my able and zealous assessor. 
Dr. Ross of Dunfermline, which I learn are highly valued. 

My young constituents, you arc busily preparing to play 
your parts in the drama of life, resolved, I trust, to oppose and 
attack what is evil, to defend and strengthen what is good, 
and, if possible, to leave your part of the world a little better 
than you found it. You are already pondering over the career 
you will pursue, what problems you will study, upon what, 
and how, your powers can be most profitably exerted; and 
apart from the choice of a career I trust you ask yourself what 
are the evils of this life, in which all our duties lie, which you 
should most strenuously endeavor to eradicate or at least to 
lessen, — what causes you will espouse, giving preference to 
these beyond all other public questions, for the student of St. 
Andrew's is expected to devote both time and labor to his duties 
as a citizen, whatever his professional career. You will find 
the world much better than your forefathers did. There is 
profound satisfaction in this, that all grows better; but there 
is still one evil in our day, so far exceeding any other in extent 
and effect, that I venture to bring it to your notice. 

Polygamy and slavery have been abolished by civilized 
nations. Duelling no longer exists where English is spoken. 
The right of private war and of privateering have passed away. 
Many other beneficent abolitions have been made in various 
fields; but there still remains the foulest blot that has ever 
disgraced the earth, the killing of civilized men by men like 
wild beasts as a permissible mode of settling international 
disputes, although in Rousseau's words, "War is the foulest 
fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of hell." As such, 
it has received from the earliest times, in each successive age 
till now, the fiercest denunciations of the holiest, wisest, and best 
of men. 

XXXII [ 2 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Homer, about eight hundred and fifty years before Christ, 
tells us it is by no means fit for a man stained with blood and 
gore to pray to the gods, and that "Religious, social, and domes- 
tic ties alike he violates, who willingly would court the honors 
of internal strife." ("Illiad," IX., 63.) 

He makes Zeus, the Cloud- Gatherer, look sternly at Arcs, 
the God of War, saying: "Nay, thou renegade, sit not by me 
and whine. Most hateful art thou to me of all the gods that 
dwell in Olympus; thou ever lovest strife, and wars, and battles." 
("Iliad," v., Une 891.) 

Euripides, 480-406 B.C., cries: "Hapless mortals, why do 
ye get your spears and deal out death to fellow -men? Stay! 
from such work forbear!" ..." Oh fools all ye who try to win 
the meed of valor through war, seeking thus to still this mortal 
coil, for, if bloody contests are to decide, strife will never cease!" 

Thucydides, who wrote his great work sometime between 
423 B.C. and 403 B.C., asserts that "Wars spring from unseen 
and generally insignificant causes, the first outbreak being often 
but an explosion of anger." And he gives us the needed lesson 
for our day which should be accepted as an axiom: "It is 
wicked to proceed against him as a wrongdoer who is ready 
to refer the question to arbitration." Aristides praised Pericles, 
because, to avoid war, " he is willing to accept arbitration." 

Andocides, about 440-388 B.C., says: "Then this is the 
distinction, Athenians, which I draw between the two: peace 
means security for the people, war inevitable downfall." 

Isocrates, 436-338 B.C., teaches that "Peace should be 
made with all mankind. It should be our care not only to make 
peace, but to maintain it. But this will never be until we are 
persuaded that quiet is better than disturbance, justice than 
injustice, the care of our own than grasping at what belongs 
to others." ("Oration on Peace.") 

The sacred books of the east make peace their chief concern. 
"Thus does he (Buddha) live as a binder together of those who 
are divided, an encourager of those who are friends, a peace- 
maker, a lover of peace, impassioned for peace, a speaker of 
words that make for peace." ("Buddhist Suttas," fifth cen- 
tury B.C.) "Now, wherein is his conduct good? Herein, that 
XXXII [ 3 ] 



ARBITRATION 

putting away the murdej^f that which Hves, he abstains from 
destroying life. The ciragcl and the sword he lays aside, and, 
full of modesty and pity, he is compassionate and kind to all 
creatures that have hfe." ("Buddhist Suttas.") 

"Truly is the King our sovereign Lord! He has regulated 
the position of the princes ; he has called in shields and spears ; 
he has returned to their cases bows and arrows." ("The Shik 
Kihg," Decade L, Ode lo.) 

Many hundred years before Christ the Zendavesta pro- 
nounces "Opposition to peace is a sin." 

The Buddhist commandment, six hundred years before 
our era, is "Love all mankind equally." 

"To those of a noble disposition, the whole world is but one 
family," says the Hindu, 

Coming to the Romans, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) says: "War 
should only be undertaken by a highly civihzed state to preserve 
either its religion or its existence." "There are two ways of 
ending a dispute — discussion and force: the latter manner is 
simply that of the brute beasts; the former is proper to beings 
gifted with reason." He also reminds the Senate, "For in this 
assembly, before the matter was decided, I said many things 
in favor of peace, and even while war was going on I retained the 
same opinions, even at the risk of my own life." No better 
proof of the true patriot and leader can be given than this — 
a lesson much needed in our day. 

Sallust (86-34 B.C.) recounts: "But after the Senate learned 
of the war between them, three young men were chosen to go 
out to Africa to both Kings, and in the words of the Senate, 
and of the people, announce to them that it was their will and 
advice that they lay down their arms and 'settle their disputes 
by arbitration rather than by the sword; since to act thus 
would be to the honor both of the Romans and themselves.' " 
("Jugurtha," XXL, 4.) 

Virgil (70-19 B.C.) laments that "The love of arms and the 
mad wickedness of war are raging. ... As for me, just come 
from war and reeking with fresh slaughter, it would be criminal 
for me to touch the gods till I shall have washed the pollution 
in the running stream." 

XXXII [ 4 ] 



ARBITRATION 

From Seneca (4 B.C.-65 a.d.) we have this outburst: 
"We punish murders and massacres among private persons; 
what do we respecting wars, and the glorious crime of murdering 
whole nations?" . . . " The love of a conquest is a murderess. 
Conquerers are scourges not less harmful to humanity than 
floods and earthquakes." 

Tacitus shrewdly observes: "To be sure every wicked man 
has the greatest power in stirring up tumult and discord; 
peace and quiet need the qualities of good men." ("Historian," 
IV., I.) This is why the demagogue comes to the surface, 
to inflame the passions of the multitude, that he may ride to 
power upon them. Beware of the man who leads you into 
war. 

Josephus, born only thirty-eight years after Christ, writes: 
"David said, 'I was willing to build God a temple myself, 
but he prohibited me, because I was polluted with blood and 
wars.' " 

Plutarch, born 46 a.d., holds that "There is no war 
among men not born of wickedness; some are aroused by 
desire of pleasures, others by too great eagerness for influence 
and power." 

Such are a few examples from the testimony of the ancients. 

I now solicit your attention to the views held and expressed 
by the early Christian fathers, which cannot but be of special 
importance to such of you as are theological students. 

Justin Martyr, who died about 165 a.d., proclaims: "That 
the prophecy is fulfilled we have good reason to believe, for 
we (Christians), who in the past killed one another, do not 
now fight our enemies." 

St. Irenceus, about 140-202 a.d., boasts that "The Christians 
have changed their swords and their lances into instruments 
of peace, and they know not how to fight." 

Clement of Alexandria, whose works were composed in the 
end of the second century and beginning of the third, writes: 
"The followers of Christ use none of the implements of war." 

Tertullian, about 150-230 A.D., asks: "How shall a Chris- 
tian go to war, how shall he carry arms in time of peace, when 
the Lord has forbidden the sword to us ? . . . Jesus Christ, 
XXXII [ 5 ] 



ARBITRATION 

in disarming St. Peter, dj^'mcd all soldiers." (" De Idololatr.," 
19.) "The military oath and the baptismal vow are inconsis- 
tent with each other, the one being the sign of Christ, the other 
of the Devil." . . . "Shall it be held lawful to make an oc- 
cupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who 
uses the sword shall perish by the sword?" 

Origen, 185-254 a.d., says: "The angels wonder that peace 
is come through Jesus to earth, for it is a place ridden with 
wars." "This is called peace, where none is at variance, 
nothing is out of harmony, where there is nothing hostile, 
nothing barbarian." "For no longer do we (Christians) take 
arms against any race, or learn to wage war, inasmuch as we 
have been made sons of peace through Jesus, whom we follow 
as our leader." ("Patrologia Graeca," XIV., pp. 46, 988, 
1231.) 

St. Cyprian, about 200-257 ^•^•^ boasts that " Christians do 
not in turn assail their assailants, since it is not lawful for the 
innocent even to kill the guilty; but they readily deliver up their 
lives and blood." (Epistle 56, to Cornelius, section 2.) 

Arnobius, who wrote about 295 A.D., says: "Certainly, if 
all who look upon themselves as men would listen a while unto 
Christ's wholesome and peaceable decrees, the whole world 
long ago, turning the use of iron to milder works, should have 
lived in most quiet tranquilhty, and have met together in a firm 
and indissoluble league of most safe concord." ("Ad versus 
Gentes, " Lib. I., page 6.) 

Lactantius, who wrote in the beginning of the fourth century, 
insists that "It can never be lawful for a righteous man to go 
to war, for his warfare is unrighteous itself." "It is not mur- 
der that God rebukes; the civil laws punish that. God's 
prohibition is intended for those acts which men considered 
lawful. Therefore it is not permitted for a Christian to bear 
arms; justice is his armor. The divine command admits no 
exceptions; man is sacred and it is always a crime to take 
his life." ("Div. Inst.," VI., 20.) Thus does he declaim 
against men-slayers: "This, then, is your road to immortahty. 
To destroy cities, devastate territories, exterminate or enslave 
free peoples ! The more you have ruined, robbed, and murdered 
XXXII [ 6 ] 



ARBITRATION 

men, the more you think yourselves noble and illustrious." 
("Div. Inst.," I., 48.) 

Athanasius, 296-373 A.D., states that when people "hear 
the teaching of Christ, straightway instead of fighting they 
turn to husbandry, and instead of arming their hands with 
weapons they raise them in prayer." ("Incarnation of the 
Word," section 52.) 

St. Gregory of Nyssa, 335-395 a.d., preaches that "He 
who promises you profit, if you abstain from the ills of war, 
bestows on you two gifts — one the remission from the train of 
evils attendant on the strife, the other the strife itself." (" Patro- 
logia Graeca," XLIV., p. 1282.) 

St. Augustine, 354-430 a.d., declares that "Not to keep 
peace is to spurn Christ." .("Migne's Patrologia Latina," 
XXXIIL, p. 186.) He holds that "defensive wars are the only 
just and lawful ones; it is in these alone that the soldier may 
be allowed to kill, when he cannot otherwise protect his city 
and his brethren." (Letter 47.) 

Isidore of Pelusium, 370-450 A.D., is no less outspoken: 
"I say, although the slaughter of enemies in war may seem 
legitimate, although the columns to the victors are erected, 
telling of their illustrious crimes, yet if account be taken of the 
undeniable and supreme brotherhood of man, not even these 
are free from evil." ("Patrologia Graeca," LXXVIII., p. 
1287.) 

We have also the undisputed historical record of Maximil- 
ian, the centurion, who, having embraced Christianity, resigned 
his position and refused to fight. For this he was put to death. 

Celsus, the great opponent of Christianity, who wrote about 
176 A.D., reproaches the Christians for refusing to bear arms, 
and states that in one part of the Roman army, including 
one-third of the whole, "Not a Christian could be found." 

Martin repHed to Julian the Apostate, "I am a Christian, 
and I cannot fight." 

If we turn to the Popes, who were then supreme : 

St. Gregory the Great, 540-604 a.d., writes the King of 
the Lombards, "By choosing peace you have shown yourself 
a lover of God, who is its author." 
XXXII [ 7 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Pope Innocent III., t#Ric King of France, in protest against 
the wars between Philip Augustus and Richard of England, 
writes: "At the moment when Jesus Christ is about to com- 
plete the mystery of redemption. He gives peace as a heritage 
to His disciples ; He wills that they observe it among themselves 
and make it observed by others. What He says at His death, 
He confirms after His resurrection. ' Peace be with you. ' These 
are the first words which He addressed to His Apostles. Peace 
is the expression of that love which is the fulfilling of the law. 
What is more contrary to love than the quarrels of men? 
Born of hate, they destroy every bond of affection; and shall 
he who loves not his neighbor love God?" 

Erasmus declares: "If there is in the affairs of mortal men 
any one thing which it is proper to explode, and incumbent 
upon every man by every lawful means to avoid, to deprecate, 
to oppose, that one thing is doubtless war." 

Luther declares :" Cannons and firearms are cruel and dam- 
nable machines. I believe them to have been the direct sugges- 
tion of the devil. If Adam had seen in vision the horrible 
instruments his children were to invent, he would have died 
of grief." 

Nothing can be clearer than that the leaders of Christianity 
immediately succeeding Christ, from whom authentic expres- 
sions of doctrines have come down to us, were well assured that 
their Master had forbidden to the Christian the killing of men 
in war or enlisting in the legions. One of the chief differences 
which separated Roman non-Christians and Christians was the 
refusal of the latter to enlist in the legions and be thus bound 
to kill their fellows in war as directed. We may well ponder 
over the change, and wonder that Christian priests accompany 
the armies of our day, and even dare to approach the Unknown, 
beseeching his protection and favor for soldiers in their heinous 
work. When the warring hosts are Christian nations, worship- 
ping the one God, which, alas, is not seldom, as in the last gigan- 
tic orgy of human slaughter in Europe, we had the spectacle 
of the rival priests, praying in the name of the Prince of Peace, 
to the God of Battles for favor. Similar prayers were offered in 
the churches, where in some instances battleflags, the emblems 
XXXII [ 8 ] 



ARBITRATION 

of carnage, were displayed. Future ages are to pronounce 
all this blasphemous. There are those of to-day who deplore 
it deeply. Even the pagan, before Christ, direct from human 
butchery, refrained from appeahng to his gods without first 
cleansing himself of the accruing pollution. 

It is a truism that the doctrines of all founders of religions 
have undergone modifications in practice, but it is strange 
indeed that the doctrine of Christ regarding war and warriors, 
as held by his immediate follov/ers, should have been so com- 
pletely discarded and reversed in the later centuries, and is so 
still. 

Bentham's words cannot be overlooked: "Nothing can be 
worse than the general feeling on the subject of war. The 
church, the state, the ruling few, the subject man, all seem in 
this case to have combined to patronize vice and crime in their 
widest sphere of evil. Dress a man in particular garments, 
call him by a particular name, and he shall have authority, 
on divers occasions, to commit every species of offence — to 
pillage, to murder, to destroy human felicity; and for so doing 
he shall be rewarded. The period will surely arrive when 
better instructed generations will require all the exidence 
of history to credit that, in times deeming themselves enlight- 
ened, human beings should have been honored with public 
approval in the very proportion of the misery they caused." 

Bacon's words come to mind: "I am of opinion that, ex- 
cept you bray Christianity in a mortar and mould it into new 
paste, there is no possibility of a holy war." 

Apparently in no field of its work in our times does the Chris- 
tian church throughout the whole world, with outstanding 
individual exceptions of course, so conspicuously fail as in its 
attitude to war — judged by the standard maintained by the 
early Christian fathers nearest in time to Christ. Its silence 
when outspoken speech might avert war, its silence during war's 
sway, its failure even during calm days of peace to proclaim 
the true Christian doctrine regarding the killing of men made 
in God's image, and the prostitution of its holy offices to unlioly 
warlike ends, give point to the recent arraignment of Prime 
Minister Balfour, who declared that the church to-day busies 
XXXII [ 9 ] 



ARBITRATION 

itself with questions whidwdo not weigh even as dust in the 
balance compared with tne vital problems with which it is 
called upon to deal. 

Volumes could be filled with the denimciations of war by 
the great moderns. Only a few can be given. 

Lord Clarendon, 1608-1674, says: "We cannot make a 
more lively representation and emblem to ourselves of hell 
than by the view of a kingdom in war." 

Hume says: "The rage and violence of public war, what is 
it but a suspension of justice among the warring parties?" 

Gibbon writes: "A single robber or a few associates are 
branded with their genuine name ; but the exploits of a numer- 
ous band assume the character of lawful and honorable war." 

"In every battlefield we see an inglorious arena of human 
degradation," says Conway. 

A strong voice from a St. Andrew's principal is heard. Sir 
David Brewster, 1 781-1868, says: "Nothing in the history of 
the species appears more inexplicable than that war, the child 
of barbarism, should exist in an age enlightened and civilized. 
But it is more inexplicable still that war should exist where 
Christianily has for nearly two thousand years been shedding 
its gentle light, and should be defended by arguments drawn 
from the Scriptures themselves." 

One of the greatest American secretaries of state, Col. 
John Hay, who has lately passed away, denounced war as 
"the most futile and ferocious of human follies." 

Much has man accomplished in his upward march from 
savagery. Much that was evil and disgraceful has been ban- 
ished from life; but the indelible mark of war still remains 
to stain the earth and discredit our claim to civilization. After 
all our progress, human slaughter is still with us; but I ask your 
attention for a few minutes to many bright rays, piercing the 
dark cloud, which encourage us. Consider for a moment what 
war was in days past. It knew no laws, had no restrictions. 
Poison and assassination of opposing rulers and generals ar- 
ranged by private bargain, and deceptive agreements, were 
legitimate weapons. Prisoners were massacred or enslaved. 
No quarter was given. Enemies were tortured and mutilated. 
XXXII [ 10 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Women, children, and non-combatants were not spared. Wells 
were poisoned. Private property was not respected. Pillage 
was the rule. Privateering and private war were allowed. 
Neutral rights at sea were almost unknown. 

Permit me briefly to trace the history of the reforms in war 
which have been achieved, from which we draw encourage- 
ment to labor for its abolition, strong in the faith that the days 
of man-slaying are numbered. 

The first action against the savage custom of war is found 
in the rules of the Amphictyonic Council of the Greeks, some 
three hundred years before Christ. Hellenes were "to quarrel 
as those who intend someday to be reconciled." They were to 
"use friendly correction, and not to devastate Hellas or burn 
houses, or think that the whole population of a city, men, 
women, and children, were ecjually their enemies and therefore 
to be destroyed." 

We owe chiefly to Grotius the modern movement to subject 
hitherto lawless war on land and sea to the humane restraints 
of law. His first book, "MareLiberum," appeared in 1609. 
It soon attracted such attention that Britain had to employ 
her greatest legal authority. Lord Selden, to make reply. Up 
to this time Spain, Portugal, and Britain had maintained that 
the surrounding seas were closed to all countries except those 
upon their shores, a doctrine not formally abandoned by 
Britain until 1803. 

Grotius's second and epoch-making work, "The Rights of 
War and Peace," appeared in 1625, and immediately arrested 
the attention of Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest warrior of 
his time. A copy was found in his tent when he died on the 
field of Lutzen. He stood constantly for mercy, even in those 
barbarous days. Three years after its appearance. Cardinal 
Richelieu, to the amazement of Europe, spared the Huguenot 
garrison and protected the city of Rochelle, when he was ex- 
pected to follow the usual practice of massacring the defenders 
and giving the town and inhabitants over to massacre and pillage. 
It was then holy work to slay heretics, sparing not one. He 
was denounced for this merciful act by his own party and 
hailed as "Cardinal of Satan" and "Pope of the Atheists," 

XXXII [ TT ] 



ARBITRATION 



The Treaty of Westphaliq^ 1648, three years after the death 
of Grotius, closed the Thirty Years' War in Germany, the 
Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands, and a long era of sav- 
agery in many parts of the globe. It shows clearly the influence 
of Grotius's advanced ideas, being founded upon his doctrine 
of tlie essential independence and equality of all sovereign 
states, and the laws of justice and mercy. In the progress 
of man from war lawless and savage, to war restricted and 
obedient to international law, no name is entitled to rank with 
his. He is the father of modern international law, so far as 
it deals with the rights of peace and war. He has had several 
eminent successors, especially Puffendorf, Bynkershock, and 
Vattel. These four are called by Phillimore "The Umpires 
of International Disputes." They are followed closely by a 
second quartette, the British judge — Stowell, and the American 
judges — Marshall, Story, and Field. 

International law is unique in one respect. It has no 
material force behind it. It is a proof of the supreme force 
of gentleness — the irresistible pressure and final triumph of 
what is just and merciful. To the few who have contributed 
conspicuously to its growth in the past, and to those laboring 
therein to-day, civilization owes an unpayable debt. Private 
individuals have created it, and yet the nations have been glad 
to accept. British judges have repeatedly declared that "In- 
ternational law is in full force in Britain." It is so in America 
and other countries. We have in this self-created, self -develop- 
ing, and self -forcing agency one of the two most powerful and 
beneficial instruments for the peace and progress of the world. 

The most important recent reforms effected in the laws of 
war are those of the Treaty of Paris (1856), the Treaty of 
Washington (187 1), which settled the Alabama claims, and 
the Brussels Declaration of 1874. 

The Treaty of Paris marks an era as having enshrined 
certain principles. First, it abolished privateering. Hence- 
forth, war on tlie sea is confined to national warships, organized 
and manned by officers and men in the service of the state. 
Commerce is no longer subject to attack by private adventurers 
seeking spoil. Second, it ruled that a blockade to be recognized 
xxxn [ 12 J 



ARBITRATION 

must be effective. Third, it established the doctrine that an 
enemy's goods in a neutral ship are free, except contraband. 
These are great steps forward, 

America declined to accept the first (in which, however, 
she has now concurred) unless private property was totally 
exempt on sea as on land, for which she has long contended, 
and which the powers, except Britain, have generally favored. 
So strongly has the current set recently in its favor that hopes 
are entertained that the forthcoming conference at The Hague 
may reach this desirable result. It is the final important ad.- 
vance in this direction that remains to be made, and means 
that peaceful commerce has been rescued from the demon 
war. Should it ]3c made, the trenchers of St. Andrew's students 
may well whirl in the air with cheers. 

The Treaty of Washington is probably to rank in history 
as Mr. Gladstone's greatest service, because it settled by ar- 
bitration the Alabama claims, a question fraught with danger 
and which, if left open, would probably have driven apart 
and kept hostile to each other for a long period the two branches 
of the English-speaking race. A statesman less powerful with 
the great masses of his countrymen could not have carried the 
healing measure, for much had to be conceded by Britain, 
for which it deserves infinite credit. Three propositions were 
insisted upon by America as a basis for arbitration, and although 
all were reasonable and should have been part of international 
law, still they were not. Their fairness being recognized, 
Mr. Gladstone boldly and magnanimously agreed that the 
arbiters should be guided by them. These defined very clearly 
the duties of neutrals respecting the fitting out of ships of war 
in their ports, or the use of their ports as a naval base. This 
they must now use "due diligence" to prevent. 

Morley says, in his Life of Gladstone: "The Treaty of 
Washington and the Geneva arbitration stand out as the most 
noble victory in the nineteenth century of the noble art of pre- 
ventive diplornacy, and the most signal exhibition in their his- 
tory of self-command in two of three chief democratic powers 
of the Western World." 

The Brussels Convention met in 1874. 
XXXII [ 13 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Even as late as the |p^licr half of last century the gixing 
up of towns and their inhabitants to the fury of the troops whicli 
stormed them was permitted Ijy the usages of war. Defending 
his conduct in Spain, WelHngton says: "I believe it has always 
been understood that defenders of a fortress stormed have no 
right to quarter." After the storming of San Sebastian, as 
to plunder, he says : " It has fallen to my lot to take many towns 
by storm, and I am concerned to add that I never saw nor heard 
of one so taken by any troops that it was not plundered." 

Shakespeare's description of the stormed city can never 
be forgotten: 

" The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, 
And the flushed soldier rough and hard 
In liberty of bloody hand shall range 
With conscience wide as hell." 

This inhuman practice was formally abolished by the 
Brussels Declaration — that "a town taken by storm shall not 
be given up to the victorious troops to plunder." To-day to 
put a garrison to the sword would be breach of the law of quarter, 
as well as a violation of the Brussels Declaration. We may rest 
assured the civilized world has seen the last of that atrocity. 

We look back from the pinnacle of our high ci\'ilization with 
surprise and horror to find that even in Wellington's time, 
scarcely one hundred years ago, such savagery was the rule; 
but so shall our descendants after a like interval look back 
from a still higher pinnacle upon our slaying of man in war 
as equally atrocious, equally unnecessary, and equally inde- 
fensible. 

Let me summarize what has l)ccn gained so far in mitigating 
the atrocities of war in our march onward to the reign of peace. 
Non-combatants are now spared, women and children are no 
longer massacred, quarter is given, and prisoners are well 
cared for. Towns are not given over to pillage, private property 
on land is exempt, or if taken is paid or receipted for. Poisoned 
wells, assassination of rulers and commanders by private bar- 
gain, and deceptive agreements, are infamies of the past. On 
the sea, privateering has been abohshed, neutral rights greatly 
extended and property protected, and the right of search 
XXXII [ 14 ] 



ARBITRATION 

narrowly restricted. So much is to be credited to the pacific 
power of international law. There is great cause for con- 
gratulation. If man has not been striking at the heart of the 
monster war, he has at least been busily engaged drawing 
some of its poisonous fangs. 

Thus even throughout the savage reign of man-slaying we 
see the blessed law of evolution unceasingly at work performing 
its divine mission, making that which is better than what has 
been and ever leading us on toward perfection. 

We have only touched the fringe of the crime so far, however, 
the essence of which is the slaughter of human beings, the 
failure to hold human life sacred, as the early Christians did. 

One deplorable exception exists to the march of improve- 
ment. A new stain has recently crept into the rules of war 
as foul as any that war has been forced by public sentiment 
to discard. It is the growth of recent years. Gentilis,^Grotius, 
and all the great publicists before Bynkcrshoek, dominated 
by the spirit of Roman law, by chivalry and long estabhshcd 
practice, insist upon the necessity of a formal declaration of 
war, "that he be not taken unawares under friendly guise." 
Not until the beginning of the last century did the opposite 
view begin to find favor. To-day it is held that a formal declar- 
ation is not indispensable and that war may begin without it. 
Here is the only step backward to be met with in the steady 
progress of reforming the rules of war. It is no longer held 
to be contrary to these for a power to surprise and destroy 
while yet in friendly conference with its adversary, endeavoring 
to effect a peaceful settlement. It belongs to the infernal armory 
of assassins hired to kill or poison opposing generals, of forged 
despatches, poisoned wells, agreements made to be broken, 
and all the dialDolic weapons which, for very shame, men have 
been forced to abandon as too infamous even for the trade of 
man-slaying. It proclaims that any party to a dispute can 
first in his right hand carry gentle peace, sitting in friendly 
conference, ostensibly engaged in finding a peaceful solution 
of differences, while with the left he grasps, concealed, the 
assassin's dagger. The parallel between duel and war runs 
very close through history. The challenger to a duel gave 
XXXII [ 15 ] 



ARBITRATION 

the other party notice, ^i 1187, the German Diet at Nurem- 
berg enacted: "We decree and enact by this edict that he who 
intends lo damage another or to injure him shall give him notice 
three days before." It is to be hoped that the coming conference 
will stamp this treachery as contrary to the rules of war, and 
thus return lo the ancient and more chivalrous idea of attack 
only after notice. 

We come now to the consideration of the other command- 
ing force in the campaign against war — peaceful arbitration. 

The originator of the world-wide arbitration idea was 
Emeric Cruce, born at Paris about 1590. Of his small book of 
two hundred and twenty-six pages upon the subject only one copy 
exists. Gerloius had propounded the idea in the twelfth cen- 
tury, but it failed to attract attention. Balch says: "Cruce pre- 
sented what was probably the first real proposal of substituting 
international arbitration for war as the court of last resort of 
nations." It has a quaint preface: "This book would gladly 
make the tour of the inhabited world so as to be seen by all 
the kings, and it would not fear any disgrace, having truth for 
its escort and the merit of its subject, which must serve as let- 
ters of recommendation and credit." 

Henry IV., in 1603, produced his scheme for consolidating 
Europe in order to abolish war; but as its fundamental idea 
was armed force and in\-olved the overthrow of the Hapsburgs, 
it can not be considered as in the line with the system of peace- 
ful arbitration. 

St. Pierre, the Due de Lorraine, William Penn, the Quaker 
founder of Pennsylvania, Bentham, Kant, Mill, and others 
have labored to substitute the reign of law for war by produc- 
ing schemes much alike in character, so that we have many 
proofs of the irrepressible longing of man for release from the 
scourge. 

I beg now to direct your attention to the most fruitful of all 
conferences that have ever taken place. Other conferences 
have been held, but always at the end of war, and their first 
duty was to restore peace between the belligerents. The 
Hague Conference was the first ever called to discuss the means 
of establishing peace without reference to any particular war. 
xxxu [ 16 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Twenty-six nations were represented, including all the leading 
powers. 

The Conference was called by the present Emperor of Russia, 
August 24, 1898, and is destined to be forever memorable from 
having realized Cruce's ideal, and given to the world its first 
permanent court for the settlement of international disputes. 
The last century is in future ages to remain famous as having 
given birth to this high court of humanity. The conference 
opened upon the birthday of the Emperor, May 18, 1899. 
The day may yet become one of the world's holidays in the com- 
ing day of peace, as that upon which humanity took one of its 
longest and highest steps in its history, onward and upward. 
As Ambassador White says, "The Conference marks the first 
stage in the abolition of the scourge of war." Such an achieve- 
ment was scarcely expected, even by the most sanguine. Its 
accomplishment surprised most of the members of the Conference 
themselves ; but so deeply and generally had they been appalled 
by the ravages of war, and its enormous cost, by its inevitable 
progeny of future wars, and above all by its failure to ensure 
lasting peace, that the idea of a world-court captivated the 
assembly, which has been pronounced the most distinguished 
that ever met. A less sweeping proposal would probably not 
have touched their imagination and aroused their enthusiasm. 
The prompt acceptance of the international court by public 
sentiment in all countries was no less surprising. Every one of 
the powers represented promptly ratified the treaty, the United 
States Senate voting unanimously — a rare event. We may justly 
accept this far-reaching and rapid success as evidence of a deep, 
general, and earnest desire in all lands to depose war and enthrone 
peace through the judicial settlement of disputes by courts. 

At last there is no excuse for war. A tribunal is now at 
hand to judge wisely and deliver righteous judgment between 
nations. It has made an auspicious start. A number of 
disputes have already been settled by it. First, it settled a 
difference between the United States and Mexico. Then 
President Roosevelt, when asked to act as arbiter, nobly led 
Britain, Germany, France, Italy, America, and Venezuela to 
it for settlement of their differences. 
XXXII [ 17 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Britain had recently a narrow escape from war with Russia, 
arising from the unfortunate incident upon the Dogger Bank, 
when fishing boats were struck by shots from Russian war- 
ships. There was intense excitement. The Hague Treaty 
provides that when such difficulties arise international commis- 
sions of inquiry be formed. This was the course pursued by 
two governments, parties to the treaty, which happily preserved 
the peace. 

It was under another provision of the Hague Conference that 
the President of the United States addressed his recent note to 
Japan and Russia suggesting a conference looking to peace, and 
offering his services to bring it about. His success was thus 
made possible by the Hague Treaty. The world is fast awaken- 
ing to its far-reaching consequences and to the fact that the 
greatest advance man has ever made by one act is the creation 
of a world-court to settle international disputes. 

As I write, report comes that to-morrow the august tribunal 
is to begin hearing France and Britain upon their differences 
regarding Muscat. There sits the divinest conclave that ever 
graced the earth, judged by its mission, which is the fulfilment 
of the prophecy, "Men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, 
and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up 
sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." 

Thus the w^orld-court goes marching on, to the dethrone- 
ment of savage war and the enthronement of peaceful arbitra- 
tion. 

The Hague tribunal has nothing compulsory about it; all 
members are left in perfect freedom as to whether they submit 
questions to it or not. This has sometimes been regarded 
as its weakness, but it is, from another point of view, its strong- 
est feature. Like international law, it depends upon its merits 
to win its way, and, as we have seen, it is succeeding; but so 
anxious are many to hasten the abolition of war that suggestions 
are made toward obtaining the consent of the powers to agree 
to submit to it certain classes of questions. In this it may be 
well to make haste slowly and refrain from exerting pressure. 
This will all come in good time. Peace wins her way not b}' 
force; her appeal is to the reason and the conscience of man. 
XXXII [ i8 ] 



ARBITRATION 

In all treaties hitherto the great powers have retained power 
to withhold submission of questions affecting "their honor 
or vital interests." This was only natural at first, and time 
is required gradually to widen the range of subjects to be 
submitted. The tendency to do this is evident, and it only needs 
patience to reach the desired end. The greatest step for- 
ward in this direction is that Denmark and the Netherlands 
and Chili and Argentina have just concluded treaties agreeing 
to submit to arbitration all disputes, making no exception 
whatever. To crown this noble work, the latter two have 
erected a statue to the Prince of Peace on the highest peak of 
the Andes, which marks the long-disputed boundary between 
them. 

Another splendid advance in this direction has been made in 
the agreement to arbitrate all c^uestions between Sweden and 
Norway. Questions affecting "independence, integrity, or vital 
interests " are excepted ; but should any difference arise as to 
what to do, that question is to be submitted. In other words, 
either nation can claim that a question does so, and, if the 
Hague tribunal agrees, it is not arbitrated. But if the tribunal 
decides the dift'erence does not concern the "independence, in- 
tegrity, or vital interests of either country," then it is submitted 
to arbitration. This is certainly a step forward; and you 
will please note that intangible thing — "honor" — is omitted. 

These nations are to be cordially congratulated on taking 
the initial step in this splendid advance. We grudge not the 
honor and glory that have fallen to them therefrom, though 
in our hearts we may feel that this might more appropriately 
have been the work of the race that abolished slavery, both 
branches participating, and also abolished the duel. What our 
race should now do is to follow the example set and conclude 
such a treaty, operative within the wide boundaries of English- 
speakers, empire and republic. Less than this were derogatory 
to our past as pioneers of progress. We cannot long permit 
these small nations to march in advance. We should at least 
get abreast of them. 

We have noted that honor or vital interests have hitherto 
been excepted from submission by arbitration treaties. We 
XXXII [ 19 ] 



ARBITRATION 

exclaim, "Oh, Libcrty,^miat crimes arc committed in thy 
name!" — but these are trilling compared with those committed 
in the name of "honor," the most dishonored word in our lan- 
guage. Never did man or nation dishonor another man or 
nation. This is impossible. All honor's wounds are sclf-in- 
llicted. All stains upon honor come from within, never from 
without. Innocence seeks no revenge; there is nothing to 
be revenged — guilt can never be. Man or nation whose honor 
needs vindication beyond a statement of the truth, which puts 
calumny to shame, is to be pitied. Innocence rests with that, 
truth has a c^uiet breast, for the guiltless find that 

" So dear to Heaven is saintly Innocence, 
A thousand liveried angels lackey her 
To keep her from all sense of sin and shame. '-' 

Innocent honor, assailed, discards bloody revenge and seeks 
the halls of justice and of arbitration. It has been held in the 
past that, a man's honor assailed, vindication lay only through 
the sword. To-day it is sometimes still held that a nation's 
honor, assailed, can in like manner be vindicated only through 
war; but it is not open to a member of our race to hold this 
doctrine, for within its wide boundaries no dispute between 
men can be lawfully adjusted outside the courts of law. In- 
stead of vindicating his honor, the EngHsh -speaking man who 
violated the law by seeking redress by personal violence would 
dishonor himself. Under our law, no wrong against man can 
be committed that justifies the crime of private vengeance 
after its commission. 

The man of our race who holds that his country would be 
dishonored by agreeing to unrestricted arbitration forgets that 
according to this standard he is personally dishonored by doing 
that very thing. Individually he has become civilized, nation- 
ally he remains barbaric, refusing peaceful settlement and 
insisting upon national revenge — all for injured honor. 

Which of us would not rejoice to have Britain and America 
share with Denmark and Holland, Chili and Argentina, the 
"dishonor" they have recently incurred, and esteem it a proud 
possession ? 

xxxn [ 20 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Nations are only aggregates of the individual. The parallel 
between war and the duel is complete; and as society within 
our race already relies upon courts of justice to protect its mem- 
bers from all wrongs, so shall the nations finally rely upon 
international courts. 

Objection has been made that unreasonable, dishonoring, 
or baseless claims might be made under arbitration. That any 
member of the family of nations would present a claim wholly 
without basis, or that the court would not decide against it 
if made, is a danger purely hypothetical. The agreement 
between nations when made will undoubtedly be framed in 
accordance with the ideas of Grotius, and the independence 
and equality of all members and their existing territories recog- 
nized. These could not be assailed. 

Three incidents have occurred since the court was organized 
which have caused much pain to the friends of peace through- 
out the world. 

America refused the offer of the Filipinos to adjust their 
quarrel by arbitration. Britain refused the offer of the Trans- 
vaal Republic to arbitrate, ahhough three of the court proposed 
by the republic were to be British judges, and the other two 
judges of Holland — the most remarkable offer ever made, 
highly creditable to the maker and a great tribute to British 
judges. Neither Russia nor Japan suggested submission to 
The Hague. Since the Hague court is the result of the Russian 
Emperor's initiative, this caused equal surprise and pain. The 
explanation has been suggested that peaceful conferences were 
being held when Japan attacked at Port Arthur without notice, 
rendering arbitration impossible. 

We must recognize these discouraging incidents, but we have 
the consolation left us of believing that, had either of the three 
nations seen, at the beginning, the consequences of ignoring 
arbitration, as clearly as they did later, they would have ac- 
cepted arbitration and had reason to congratulate themselves 
upon the award of the court, whatever it was. They will 
learn by experience. Notwithstanding these regrettable failures 
to refer disputes to the Hague court as peaceful umpire, we 
have abundant reason for satisfaction in the number of instances 
xxxn [ 21 ] 



ARBITRATION 

in which the court's a\v«#i lias already brought peace without 
the sacrifice of one human Hfe — the victories which bring 
no tears. 

Signs of action in favor of uni\-ersal peace abound. Among 
these may be mentioned that the Inter-Parhamentary Union 
assembled at St. Louis in 1904 requested the governments 
of the world to send representatives to an international con- 
ference to consider: First, the questions for the consideration 
of which the Conference at the Hague expressed a wish that a 
future Conference be called. Second, the negotiation of arbi- 
tration treaties between the nations represented. Third, the 
advisability of estabhshing an international congress to be 
convened periodically for the discussion of international ques- 
tions. 

President Roosevelt invited the nations lo cull the Conference, 
but has recently deferred to the Emperor of Russia as the proper 
party to call the nations together again. 

Should the proposed periodic congress be established, we 
shall have the germ of the council of nations, which is coming 
to keep the peace of the world, judging between nations, as 
the Supreme Court of the United States judges to-day between 
states embracing an area larger than Europe. It will be no 
novelty, but merely an extension of an agency already proved 
upon a smaller scale. As we dwell upon the rapid strides 
toward peace which man is making, the thought arises that 
there may be those now present who will live to see this 
world-council established, through which is sure to come in the 
course of time the banishment of man-slaying among civilized 
nations. 

I hope my hearers will follow closely the proceedings of 
the Hague Conference, for upon its ever-extending sway largely 
depends the coming of the reign of peace. Its next meeting 
will be important, perhaps epoch-making. Its creation and 
speedy success prepare us for surprisingly rapid progress. 
Even the smallest further step taken in any peaceful direction 
would soon lead to succcessive steps thereafter. The tide has 
set in at last, and is flowing as never before for the principle 
of arbitration as against war. 

XXXII [ 22 ] 



ARBITRATION 

So much for the temple of peace at The Hague. Permit 
me a few words upon arbitration in general. 

The statesmen who first foresaw and proved the benefits 
of modern arbitration were Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, 
Jay, and Grenville. 

As early as 1780 Franklin writes: "We make daily great 
improvements in Natural, there is one I wish to see in Moral, 
Philosophy — the discovery of a plan that would induce and 
oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting 
each other's throats." His wish was realized in the Jay 
Treaty of 1794, from which modern arbitration dates. It is 
noteworthy that this treaty was the child of our race, and that 
the most important questions which arbitration has settled 
so far have been those between its two branches. 

It may surprise you to learn that from the date of the Jay 
Treaty, one hundred and eleven years ago, no less than five 
hundred and seventy-one international disputes have been 
settled by arbitration. Not in any case has an award been 
questioned or disregarded, except, I believe, in one case, 
where the arbiters misunderstood their powers. If in every 
ten of these differences so quietly adjusted vdthout a wound 
there lurked one war, it follows that peaceful settlement has 
prevented fifty-seven wars — one every two years. IMore than 
this, had the fifty-seven wars, assumed as prevented by arbi- 
tration, developed, they would have sown the seeds of many 
future wars, for there is no such prolific mother of wars as 
war itself. Hate breeds hate, quarrel breeds quarrels, war 
breeds war — a hateful progeny. It is the poorest of all reme- 
dies. It poisons as it cures. No truer line was ever penned 
than this of Milton's, "For what can war but endless war 
still breed?" 

No less than twenty-three international treaties of arbitra- 
tion have been made within the past two years. The United 
States made ten with the principal powers, which only failed 
to be formally executed because the Senate, which shares 
with our Executive the treaty-making power to the extent 
that its approval is necessary, thought it advisable to change 
one word only — "treaty" for "agreement" — which proved 
XXXII [ 23 ] 



ARBITRATION 

unsatisfactory to the Exmitivc. The vote of the Senate was 
ahnost unanimous, showing an overwhelming sentiment for 
arbitration. The internal difference will no doubt be adjusted. 

You will judge from these facts how rapidly arbitration 
is spreading. Once tried, there is no backward step. It pro- 
duces peace and leaves no bitterness. The parties to it become 
better friends than l^efore; war makes them enemies. 

Much has been written upon the fearful cost of war in our 
day, the ever-increasing blood tax of nations, which threatens 
soon to approach the point of exhaustion in several European 
lands. To-day France leads with an expenditure of ;^3 14s. 
and a debt of ;;^3i 3s. 8d. per head. Britain follows with an 
annual expenditure of ;;^3 8s. 8d. and a debt of ;^i8 los. 5d. 
per head. Germany's expenditure is in great contrast — only 
;^i 15s. 4d., not much more than one-third; her debt, £2 12s. 
2d. not one-sixth that of Britain. Russia's expenditure is £1 
14s. 6d., about the same as the German; her debt £5 9s. gd. 
per head. 

The military and naval expenditure of Britain is fully half 
of her total expenditure ; that of the other great powers, though 
less, is rapidly increasing. 

All the great national debts, with trifling exceptions — 
Britain's eight hundred millions, France's twelve hundred 
millions sterling — are the legacies of war. 

This drain, with the economic loss of life added, is forcing 
itself upon the nations concerned as never before. It threatens 
soon to become dangerous unless the rapid increase of recent 
years be stopped; but it is to be feared that not till after the 
financial catastrophe occurs will nations devote themselves 
seriously to apply the cure. 

The futility of war as a means of producing peace between 
nations has often been dwelt upon. It is really the most futile 
of all remedies, because it embitters contestants and sows 
the seeds of future struggles. Generations are sometimes 
required to eradicate the hostility engendered by one conflict. 
War sows dragons' teeth, and seldom gives to either party 
what it fought for. When it does, the spoil generally proves 
Dead Sea fruit. The terrible war just concluded is another 
XXXII [ 24 ] 



ARBITRATION 

case in point. Neither contestant obtained what he fought 
for, the reputed victor being most of all disappointed at last 
with the terms of peace. Had Japan, a very poor country, 
known that the result would be a debt of two hundred millions 
sterling loading her down, or had Russia known the result, 
differences would have been peacefully arbitrated. Such 
considerations fmd no place, however, in the fiery furnace of 
popular clamor; as little do those of cost or loss of life. Only 
if the moral wrong, the sin in itself, of man-slaying is brought 
home to the conscience of the masses may we hope speedily 
to banish war. There will, we fear, always be demagogues 
in our day to inflame their brutal passions and urge men to 
fight, as a point of honor and patriotism, scouting arbitration 
as a cowardly refuge. All thoughts of cost or loss of human 
life vanish when the brute in man, thus aroused, gains sway. 

It is the crime of destroying human life by war and the duty 
to offer or accept peaceful arbitration as a substitute which 
need to be established, and which, as we think, those of the 
church, the universities, and of the professions are called upon 
to strongly emphasize. 

If the principal European nations were not free through 
conscription from the problem which now disturbs the military 
authorities of Britain, the lack of sufficient numbers willing 
to enter the man-slaying profession, we should soon hear the 
demand formulated for a league of peace among the nations. 
The subject of war can never be studied without recalling 
this simplest of all modes for its abohtion. Five nations co- 
operated in quelling the recent Chinese disorders and rescuing 
their representatives in Pekin. It is perfectly clear that these 
five nations could banish war. Suppose even three of them 
formed a league of peace — inviting all other nations to join — 
and agreed that since war in any part of the civilized world 
affects all nations, and often seriously, no nation shall go to 
war, but shall refer international disputes to the Hague Con- 
ference or other arbitral body for peaceful settlement, the 
league agreeing to declare non-intercourse with any nation 
refusing compliance. Imagine a nation cut off to-day from 
the world. The league also might reserve to itself the right, 
XXXII [ 25 ] 



ARBITRATION 

where non-intercourse i^^frcly to fail or has failed to prevent 
war, to use the necessary force to maintain peace, each member 
of the league agreeing to provide the needed forces, or money 
in lieu thereof, in proportion to her population or wealth. 
Being experimental and upon trial, it might be deemed ad- 
visable, if necessary, at first to agree that any member could 
withdraw after giving five years' notice, and that the league 
should dissolve five years after a majority vote of all the mem- 
bers. Further provisions, and perhaps some adaptations, 
would be found requisite, but the main idea is here. 

The Emperor of Russia called the Hague Conference, 
which gave us an international tribunal. Were King Edward 
or the Emperor of Germany or the President of France, acting 
for their governments, to invite the nations to send repre- 
sentatives to consider the wisdom of forming such a league, 
the invitation would no doubt be responded to and probably 
prove successful. 

The number that would gladly join such a league would 
be great, for the smaller nations would welcome the opportu- 
nity. 

The relations between Britain, France, and the United 
States to-day are so close, their aims so similar, their terri- 
tories and fields of operation so clearly defined and so different, 
that these powers might properly unite in inviting other nations 
to consider the question of such a league as has been sketched. 
It is a subject well worthy the attention of their rulers, for of 
all the modes of hastening the end of war this appears the 
easiest and the best. We have no reason to doubt that arbitra- 
tion in its present optional form will continue its rapid prog- 
ress, and that it in itself contains the elements required finally 
to lead us to peace, for it conquers wherever it is tried; but 
it is none the less gratifying to know that there is in reserve 
a drastic mode of enforcement, if needed, which would promptly 
banish war. 

Notwithstanding all the cheering signs of the growth of 

arbitration, we should delude ourselves if we assumed that 

war is immediately to cease, for it is scarcely to be hoped that 

the future has not to witness more than one great holocaust 

XXXII [ 26 ] 



ARBITRATION 

of men to be offered up before the reign of peace blesses the 
earth. The scoria from the smouldering mass of the fiery 
past, the seeds that great wars have sown, may be expected 
to burst out at intervals more and more remote, until the 
poison of the past is exhausted. That there is to be perfect 
unbroken peace in our progress to this end we are not so un- 
duly sanguine as to imagine. We are prepared for more than 
one outbreak of madness and folly in the future as in the past; 
but that peace is to come at last, and that sooner, much sooner, 
than the majority of my hearers can probably credit, I for one 
entertain not one particle of doubt. 

We sometimes hear, in defence of war, that it develops 
the manly virtue of courage. This means only physical 
courage, which some animals and the lower order of savage 
men possess in the highest degree. According to this idea, the 
more man resembles the bulldog the higher he is developed 
as man. The Zulus, armed with spears, rush upon repeating 
rifles, not because unduly endowed with true courage, but 
because they lack common sense. One session or less at St. 
Andrew's University would cure them of their folly. In our 
scientific day, beyond any that has preceded, discretion is by 
far the better part of valor. Officers and men, brave to a 
fault, expose themselves needlessly and die for the country 
they would have better served by sheltering themselves and 
living for. Physical courage is far too common to be specially 
extolled. Japanese, Russian and Turk, Zulu and Achenese 
are all famous for it. It is often allied with moral cowardice. 
Hotspur is an ideal physical-courage hero when he exclaims — 

"By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap. 
To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon. 
Or dive into the bottom of the deep, 
Where fathom line could never touch the ground. 
And pluck up drowned honor by the locks; 
So that he that doth redeem her thence might wear 
Without corrival all her dignities." 

Vain peacock, unless he could reap the glory and strut be 
spangled with glittering decorations, he cared not to achieve. 
All for himself, nothing for the cause, nothing for his country. 
XXXII [ 27 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Achilles, sulking in 1^ tent, incensed upon the question 
of loot and praying the gods to defeat his own countrymen, is 
another example of a physically courageous military hero. 
Fortunately our modern military men are generally of a different 
type. It is not the individual who conforms to the standard 
of his age, but the bad standard of the age that is to be con- 
demned. Men are to be judged only by the standard of their 
time, and though our standard of to-day may be low indeed, 
the men conforming to it are not to be decried. 

If you would be lifted up and inspired by worshipping at 
the shrine of the much nobler and rarer virtue, moral courage, 
stand before the Martyrs' Monument yonder. The martyrs 
cared nothing for earthly glory and honor or reward; their 
duty was to stand for a noble cause, and for that, not for their 
own selfish exaltation, they marched through fire and fagot 
to death unflinchingly, chanting as they marched. 

There is one very encouraging indication of progress within 
our race, as showing, it is to be hoped, the influence of educa- 
tion upon the masses in evolving clearer ideas of responsi- 
biUty for their actions. The attention of Parliament was 
recently called to the difficulty of obtaining recruits for the 
army. The shortage of officers in the auxiliary forces (volun- 
teers and militia) is no less than twenty-five per cent. — one- 
fourth of the whole. The militia has 32,000 men less than 
before. The regular army lacks 242 officers, and the British 
army for India is short 12,000 British recruits. The Govern- 
ment pronounces this "the most serious problem which con- 
fronts the mihtary authorities." Some of the highest military 
authorities see the final remedy only in conscription. I re- 
joice to inform you that your kin beyond sea in America have 
on hand the very same problem for their navy- Their army, 
being so small, is not yet affected. All their warships can- 
not be manned — 3,500 men are lacking. From this shortage 
of recruits we are justified in concluding that there is no longer 
a general desire in our race to enter the services. This is 
specially significant, as we are informed that increase of pay 
would not greatly increase recruiting, as recruits are obtained 
chiefly from a certain class. We hear of a like trouble in 
XXXII [ 28 ] 



ARBITRATION 

another profession, a scarcity of young, educated, conscientious 
men desirous of entering the ministry, thought to be owing to 
the theological tenets to which they are required to subscribe. 
Both branches of the church in Scotland 'have accordingly 
endeavored to meet this problem by substituting less objec- 
tionable terms. 

Perhaps from the public library young men have taken 
Carlyle and read how he describes the artisans of Britain and 
France: "Thirty stand fronting thirty, each with a gun in 
his hand. Straightway the word 'fire' is given, and they 
blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, 
useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it 
must bury and anew shed tears for. Had these men any 
quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived 
far enough apart, were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide 
a universe there was even, unconsciously, by commerce; some 
mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! 
Their governors had fallen out, and, instead of shooting one 
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads 
shoot." 

Those who decline the advances of the decorated recruit- 
ing officer may have stumbled upon Professor MacMichael's 
address to the Peace Congress at Edinburgh, 1853, when he 
said: "The mihtary profession is inconsistent with Chris- 
tianity. The higher the rank and the greater the intellect, 
the more desperate the criminality. Here is a person upon 
whom God has conferred the rare gift of mathematical genius. 
If properly directed, what an abundant source of benefit to 
mankind! It might be employed in the construction of rail- 
ways, by which the most distant parts of the world are brought 
into communication with each other. It might be employed 
in flashing the trembling lightning across the wires, making 
them the medium of intercourse between loving hearts thou- 
sands of miles apart; in increasing the wonderful powers of 
the steam engine, relieving man from his exhausting toils; 
in application to the printing press, sending light and knowl- 
edge to the farthest extremities of the earth. It might be 
employed in draining marshes, in supplying our towns and 
XXXII [ 29 ] 



ARBITRATION 

cities with water, and in^ding to the health and happiness 
of men. It might lay down rules derived from the starry 
heavens, by which the mariner is guided through the wild 
wastes of waters in the darkest night. How noble is science 
when thus directed, but in the same proportion how debasing 
does it become when directed to human destruction! It is as 
if a chemist were to make use of his knowledge not to cure the 
diseases of which humanity is suffering, but to poison the 
springs of existence. The scientific soldier cultivates his en- 
dowments for what purpose? That he may determine the 
precise direction at which these batteries may vomit forth their 
fire so as to destroy most property and most li\'es; that he 
may calculate the precise angles and force with which these 
shells may be sent up into the air that they may fall upon that 
particular spot which is thronged with men, and, exploding 
there, send havoc among them. Great God! am I at liberty 
to devote my faculties to the infernal work?" 

That is a voice from Dunfermline of weighty import. I 
found it recently and rejoiced that, when a child, I had often 
seen the man who wrote these words. 

Wyclif's opinion may have arrested the young men's atten- 
tion: "What honor falls to a knight that kills many men? 
The hangman killeth many more and with a better title. Better 
were it for men to be butchers of beasts than butchers of their 
brethren!" 

Or John Wesley's wail may have struck deep in the hearts 
of some fit for recruits: "You may pour out your soul and 
bemoan the loss of true, genuine love in the earth. Lost 
indeed! These Christian kingdoms that are tearing out each 
other's bowels, desolating one another with fire and sword! 
These Christian armies that are sending each other by thou- 
sands, by tens of thousands, quick to hell!" 

It may be from eminent soldiers that young men have 
received the most discouraging accounts of the profession. 
Napoleon declared it "the trade of barbarians." Wellington 
writes Lord Shaftesbury: "War is a most detestable thing. 
If you had seen but one day of war, you would pray God you 
might never see another." General Grant, offered a military 
XXXII [ 30 ] 



ARBITRATION 

review by the Duke of Cambridge, declined, saying he never 
wished to look upon a regiment of soldiers again. General 
Sherman writes he was "tired and sick of the war. Its glory 
is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a 
shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded, who 
cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. 
War is hell." 

Perhaps some have pondered over Sir John Sinclair's 
opinion that "the profession of a soldier is a damnable pro- 
fession." 

The professional soldier is primarily required for purposes 
of aggression, it being clear that if there were none to attack, 
none to defend would be needed. The volunteer, who arms 
only to be better able to defend his home and country, occupies 
a very different position from the recruit who enlists uncon- 
ditionally as a profession and binds himself to go forth and 
slay his fellows as directed. The defence of home and country 
may possibly become necessary, although no man living in 
Britain or America has ever seen invasion or is at all likely 
to see it. Still, the elements of patriotism and duty enter 
here. That it is every man's duty to defend home and country 
goes without saying. We should never forget, however, that 
which makes it a holy duty to defend one's home and country 
also makes it a holy duty not to invade the country and home of 
others, a truth which has not hitherto been kept in mind. The 
more's the pity, for in our time it is one incumbent upon the 
thoughtful, peace-loving man to remember. The professional 
career is an affair of hire and salary. No duty calls any man 
to adopt the naval or military profession and engage to go 
forth and kill other men when and where ordered, without 
reference to the right or wrong of the quarrel. It is a serious 
engagement involving, as we lookers-on see it, a complete sur- 
render of the power most precious to man — the right of private 
judgment and appeal to conscience. Jay, the father of the 
first treaty between Britain and America, has not failed to point 
out that "our country, right or wrong, is rebellion against 
God and treason to the cause of civil and religious liberty, of 
justice and humanity." 

XXXII [ 31 ] 



ARBITRATION 

Just in proportion ai0tna.n becomes truly intelligent, we 
must expect him to realize more and more that he himself 
alone is responsible for his selection of an occupation, and 
that neither pope, priest, nor king can reheve him from this 
responsibility. 

It was all very well for the untaught, illiterate hind, pressed 
into King Henry's service, to argue: "Now, if these men do not 
die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them 
to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of sub- 
jection." The schoolmaster has been abroad since then. 
The divine right of kings has gone. The mass of English- 
speaking men now make and unmake their kings, scout inf al- 
libiHty of power of pope or priest, and in extreme cases some- 
times venture to argue a point even with their own minister. 
The "Judge within" begins to rule. Whether a young man 
decides to devote his powers to making of himself an efficient 
instrument for injuring or destroying, or for saving and serving 
his fellows, rests with himself to decide after serious considera- 
tion. 

To meet the scarcity of officers, the Government stated that 
it was considering the policy of looking to the universities for 
the needed supply, and that steps might be taken to encourage 
the study of war with a view to cnUstment; but if university 
students are so far advanced ethically as to decline pledging 
themselves to preach "creeds outworn" — rightfully most care- 
ful to heed the "Judge within," their own conscience — uni- 
versities will probably be found poor recruiting ground for 
men required to pledge themselves to go forth and slay their 
fellow-men at another's bidding. The day of humihation will 
have come upon universities when their graduates, upon 
whom have been spent years of careful education in all that 
is highest and best, find themselves at the end good for nothing 
better than "food for powder." I think I hear the response 
of the son of St. Andrew's to the recruiting officer, "Is thy ser- 
vant a dog that he should do this thing?" 

From one point of view, the scarcity of officers and recruits 
in Britain and America, where men are free to choose, and the 
refusal of university students to compromise themselves by 
XXXII [ 32 ] 



ARBITRATION 

pledges upon entering the ministry, are most cheering, evincing 
as they do a keener sense of personal responsibility, a stronger 
appeal to conscience — the "Judge within" — more tender and 
sympathetic natures, a higher standard of human action, and 
altogether a higher type of man. 

If war requires a surrender of all these by its recruits, 
much better we should face the alternative and let Britain and 
America depend upon the patriotism of citizens to defend 
their countries if attacked, in which duty I for one strongly 
believe they will never be found inefficient. Colonel Hender- 
son, in his "Science of War," states "that the American Volun- 
teers were superior to the conscript levies of Europe — that 
the morale of conscript armies has always been their weakest 
point. The morale of the volunteer is of a higher type." 
This stands to reason. 

Should Britain ever be invaded, the whole male population 
able to march would volunteer, and from many parts of the 
world thousands would rush to the defence of the old home. 
Those who invade the land of Shakespeare and Burns will 
find they have to face forces they never reckoned upon. The 
hearts and consciences of all would be in the work; and 
"Thrice is he armed v/ho hath his quarrel just." 

Students of St. Andrew's, my effort has been to give you a 
correct idea of the movement now stirring the world for the 
aboHtion of war, and what it has already accomplished. It 
never was so widespread or so vigorous, nor at any stage of 
the campaign have its triumphs been so numerous and im- 
portant as those of the last few years, beginning with the 
Hague Conference, which in itself marks an epoch. The 
foundation stone of the structure to come was then laid. The 
absolute surrender by four nations of all future differences 
to arbitration, and Norway and Sweden's agreement, mark 
another stage. Thus the civilized world at last moves steadily 
to the reign of peace through arbitration. 

The question has no doubt arisen in your minds, what is 
your duty and how can you best cooperate in this holy work 
and hasten the end of war? I advise you to adopt Washing- 
ton's words as your own: "My first wish is to see this plague 
XXXII [ 33 ] 



ARBITRATION 

of mankind, war, banllR^d from the earth," Leagues of 
peace might be formed over the world with these words as 
their motto and basis of action. How are we to reahze this 
pious wish of Washington's? may be asked. Here is the 
answer. Whenever an international dispute arises, no matter 
what party is in power, demand at once that your Government 
offer to refer it to arbitration, and if necessary break with your 
party. Peace is above party. Should the adversary have 
forestalled your Government in offering arbitration, which for 
the sake of our race I trust will never occur, then insist upon 
its acceptance and listen to nothing until it is accepted. Drop 
all other public questions, concentrate your efforts upon the 
one question which carries in its bosom the issue of peace or of 
war. Lay aside your politics until this war issue is settled. 
This is the time to be effective. And what should the ministers 
of the churches be doing? Very different from what they 
have done in the past. They should cease to take shelter from 
the storm, hiding themselves in the recital of the usual for- 
mulas pertaining to a future life in which men in this Hfe have 
no duties, when the nation is stirred upon one supreme moral 
issue, and its Government, asserting the right to sit in judgment 
upon its own cause, is on the brink of committing the nation 
to unholy war — for unholy it must be if peaceful settlement 
offered by an adversary be refused. Refusal to arbitrate 
makes war, even for a good cause, unholy; an offer to arbi- 
trate lends dignity and importance to a poor one. Should all 
efforts fail, and your country, rejecting the appeal to judicial 
arbitration, plunge into war, your duty does not end. Calmly 
resolute in adherence to your convictions, stating them when 
called upon, though never violently intruding them, you await 
the result, which cannot fail to prove that those who stood for 
peaceful arbitration chose the right path and have been wise 
counsellors of their country. It is a melancholy fact that 
nations looking back have usually to confess that their wars 
have been blunders, which means they have been crimes. 

And the women of the land, and the women students of 
St. Andrew's — what shall they do? Not wait as usual until 
war has begun, and then, their sympathies aroused, organize 
XXXII [ 34 ] 



ARBITRATION 

innumerable societies for making and sending nej.ssarics and 
even luxuries to the front, or join Red Cross societies and go 
themselves to the field, nursing the wounded that these may 
the sooner be able to return to the ranks to wound others or 
be again wounded, or to kill or be killed. The tender chords 
of sympathy for the injured, which grace women, and are so 
easily stirred, are always to be cherished; but it may be sug- 
gested that were their united voices raised in stern opposition 
to war before it was declared, urging the offer of arbitration, 
or in earnest remonstrance against refusing it, one day of effort- 
would then prove more effective than months of it after war 
has begun. 

It is certain that if the good people of all parties and creeds, 
sinking for the time other political questions whenever the issue 
of war arises, were to demand arbitration, no government 
dare refuse. They have it in their power in every emergency 
to save their country from war and ensure unbroken peace. 

If in every constituency there were organized an arbitra- 
tion league, consisting of members who agree that arbitration 
of international disputes must be offered, or accepted by the 
government if offered by the adversary, pledging themselves 
to vote in support of, or in opposition to, pohtical parties 
according to their action upon this question, it would be sur- 
prising how soon both parties would accept arbitration as a 
policy. I know of no work that would prove more fruitful for 
your country and for the world than this. It is by concen- 
trating upon one issue that great causes are won. 

In this holy work of insisting upon arbitration, surely we 
may expect the men and women of St. Andrew's, of all uni- 
versities and other educational institutions, of all the churches 
and of all the professions to unite and take a prominent part. 
I quoted the words of Washington at the beginning of this 
appeal. Let me close by quoting the words of Lincoln, When 
a young man, employed upon a trading boat, he made a voy- 
age of some weeks' duration upon the Mississippi. He visited 
a slave market, where men, women, and children were not 
slaughtered, as formerly in war, but were separated and sold 
from the auction block. His companion tells that after stand- 
XXXII [ 35 ] 



ARBITRATION 

ing for some time Linc^R turned and walked silently away. 
Lifting his clenched hand, his first words were, "If ever I get 
a chance, I shall hit this accursed thing hard." Many years 
passed, during which he never failed to stand forth as the 
bitter foe of slavery and the champion of the slave. This was 
for him the paramount issue. He was true to his resolve 
throughout life, and in the course of events his time came at 
last. This poor, young, toiling boatman became President of 
the United States, and was privileged with a stroke of his pen 
to emancipate the slaves last remaining in the civilized world, 
four millions in number. He kept the faith, and gave the 
lesson for all of us in our day, who have still with us war in all 
its enormity, many of us more or less responsible for it, because 
we have not hitherto placed it above all other evils and con- 
centrated our efforts sufficiently upon its extinction. Let us 
resolve like Lincoln, and select man-slaying as our foe, as he 
did man-selling. Let us, as he did, subordinate all other 
public questions to the one overshadowing question, and, as 
he did, stand forth upon all suitable occasions to champion 
the cause. Let us, like him, keep the faith, and as his time 
came, so to us our time will come, and, as it does, let us hit 
accursed war hard until we drive it from the civilized world, 
as he did slavery. 



xxxn [ 36 ] 



XXXIII 



HISTORY 



"VALUE OF HISTORY IN THE FORMATION OF 

CHARACTER » 

BY 

CAROLINE HAZARD 

PRESIDENT OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE 



TN view of the appeal to history made in support of their 
views by both President Jordan and Mr. Carnegie, the 
following address by Miss Hazard acquires special emphasis. 
Caroline Hazard, M.A., Litt.D., is one of the only two women 
holding the rank of president of a great college. Vassar, Smith, 
and Barnard have each of them male rulers. Hence President 
Hazard may well speak with authority as representing woman 
in the realms of higher education, and the value of a knowledge 
of history assumes under her urgency a peculiar force. 

How dearly we all love a story ! From the time a child can 
listen at all he rejoices in some simple tale. Over and over the 
same thing is demanded, with no variation allowed to the narra- 
tor; it must be just the same day after day, or something is 
lacking to the childish mind. And what is history but the 
tale of the world? The story of our race, "Geschichte" the 
Germans call it frankly, the story, the tale which includes all 
tales. It is strange that the word story has a double signifi- 
cance. It may be a true or a false story. Something has grown 
into the word of the diverse personalities of the tellers of tales. 
The story is told in part only by each narrator; one may con- 
tradict the other; one may present a false picture, a distorted 
report, and another the unvarnished truth. It is no wonder that 
many writers of history fell into disrepute, that fables and stories 
were supposed to constitute the whole of history. The tale 
xxxm [ I ] 



HISTORY 

depends so much upon^^ teller. Is he fair? Is he clear in 
his perceptions ? Is he unbiassed in his judgments, having no 
theory to maintain, simply zealous for the truth? These are 
moral questions we ask, these are the questions which arc more 
important to the value of historical work than any learning. "It 
was well noted by that worthy gentleman Sir Philip Sydney," 
says Raleigh, "that historians do borrow of poets, not only 
much of their ornament but somewhat of their substance."* 
And Lord Bacon defines the office of the historian. "It is," he 
says, "to represent the events themselves together with the 
counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions there- 
upon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment."^ 
Bacon thus throws the moral responsibility directly upon the 
readers, not the writers, of history. 

But the old reproach, that historians wrote entirely from 
their own point of view, is rapidly passing away. One may be 
recommended to read Macaulay more for the style than for the 
history. But the method pursued in Guizot's "History of Civil- 
ization " has obtained a larger and larger following, and the mod- 
ern historian, basing his work on actual documents and certified 
records, while he makes perhaps less brilliant reading, certainly 
gives a more unbiassed version of facts. More and more the sci- 
ence of history is developing, as people go to the sources and 
foundations rather than rely on tradition and picturesque state- 
ment. Great tendencies are coming to be looked for, more than 
isolated facts. History is no longer a list of names and an 
array of dates, but a series of living principles, a moral tendency 
running through events which are strung upon one main string 
like the beads on a rosary. More and more our historians are 
becoming profound moralists. This, indeed, is almost inevita- 
ble, for any deeper search into the facts of history is an inquiry 
into the meaning of things. The facts spring from the inner 
necessity of the time of their being, and the philosophical 
inquirer must look deeper than the surface appearance. 

We have lately lost a very distinguished example of the 
teacher not only of history but of morals, and of the vital con- 

^ Raleigh, The History of the World. 
2 Bacon, Advancement of Learning. 
:;xxiii [ 2 ] 



HISTORY 

nection existing between the two. Eminent as were Mr. John 
Fiske's qualifications as a historian — painstaking and accurate 
in his research, brilHant and lucid in his presentation — it was 
yet his profound moral convictions which illuminated his work 
and gave it its great value. What a splendid monument he has 
left — beginning with the "Discovery of America," tracing the 
influence of " Old Virginia" and her neighbors, and the " Be- 
ginnings of New England," through the "American Revolu- 
tion" and the "Critical Period of American History," taking in 
as a side-light the " Dutch Contribution to the Development of 
America," and finally ending with the "Growth of the Missis- 
sippi" — what a great and continuous work he has left! 
The very enumeration of the titles of his books shows the 
grasp that he had on the subject. But greater even than these 
are some of the books he wrote showing his profound appre- 
ciation of the destiny of man. It was this " Destiny of Man," 
viewed in the light of his origin, which enabled him to set forth 
these great world movements. It was his profound conviction 
of the worth of man's life which gave the work of man's life its 
supreme value in his eyes. Through Nature to God was his con- 
stant theme. His important philosophical books are brief, and 
the bulk of his philosophical writings not so great as his histor- 
ical work, but its influence upon his day and generation has been 
most profound. 

I was in England at the time of his death, and was much 
interested to see the English comments. The great dailies, of 
course, had some adequate idea of his work, at least as far as the 
enumeration of the titles of his books. But one of the most 
appreciative of the notices was in a nonconformist weekly of 
large and influential circulation in Great Britain. This spoke 
of his " Destiny of Man" and of his work as a devout Darwinist 
with the greatest respect, dwelling upon him as a profound phi- 
losopher, and ending with some such sentence as this: "He is 
said to have written historical books, but we have not seen them." 
It made one smile to think what fame is in another country, be- 
cause to us certainly the bulk of John Fiske's work is his histori- 
cal work rather than his philosophical. 

But the point I want to make is that the true historian must 
xxxiil [ 3 ] 



HISTORY 

be a philosopher, and,^^a philosopher, then an inquirer into 
moral tendencies, into the great drift and trend of national life. 
This principle must run through all the work of any genuine his- 
torian. We are a little in danger in this country of exalting our 
own history, which is after all local, of forgetting that we are 
part of the whole. Of course it is necessary to teach our young 
people American history, and the great events which have led 
to our being what we are. But we are only one link in the chain 
of events. We have only advanced freedom and liberty to its 
highest degree along the line which was prepared for us as 
early as the Reformation. To teach a child anything like the 
proper place of America in the history of the world seems to me 
one of the great tasks which our schools should try to fulfil. Of 
course this cannot be done quickly. The idea of continuity, 
however, is an idea which can be given at the very beginning of 
any historical study. We are too apt to take up the study of 
history in mosaic fashion, here a bit and there a bit, quite care- 
fully worked over and prepared, but without any idea of how it 
fits together. The study of Roman history has become one of 
the requirements, lately, for entrance examinations, and it seems 
to me a most valuable addition to college-entrance require- 
ments. Roman law, after all, is the foundation of all our juris- 
prudence, and though the real historian may say that in choosing 
Rome as a starting-point we are making an arbitrary choice, and 
that we should go back into the Far East and into the dim 
recesses of time, yet, after all, the Roman civilization is the first 
civilization of which we can have much definite knowledge, and, 
therefore, is a convenient and a safe starting-point for all subse- 
quent historical work. 

This is not the time to consider the relations of national 
character to national history. The history has grown out of the 
development of character, and character, conversely, has been 
moulded by the history of the nation. We think of Switzerland 
as a synonym for freedom, and the Swiss have been nurtured on 
the recital of the deeds of their forefathers. The Scottish peo- 
ple, too, with their devotion of loyalty, their keenness and 
shrewdness learned in many a border warfare and many a fight 
for a losing cause, are an example of what the history of their 
XXXIII [ 4 ] 



HISTORY 

nation has made them. Who that hears " Bonnie Charlie " sung 
as it can be sung in Scotland, but is touched by that longing 
for the unattainable which is the blessing and the despair of the 
idealist ? 

Will you no- come back again? 
Better lo'ed ye canna be, 
Will ye no' come back again? 

The whole episode is summed up in a few verses of a song, 
perhaps the most potent result of that ill-starred attempt. For 
in this all the highest emotions of a patriot find play. It was 
the literal Prince Charhe to whom the people looked as their 
best good ; it is now all devotion and loyalty to all good things 
that speaks in the touching refrain of a song universally 
beloved. 

But the special theme for this evening is the "Relation of 
the Study of History to the Formation of Character," and it 
seems to me, in a country such as our own, with a population 
made up of diverse elements, where the force of tradition is of 
necessity limited — where, indeed, in many parts of the country 
we are making traditions, so far as civilization is concerned — 
that the study of history as a contribution to the formation of a 
sound and useful character is of the utmost importance. We are 
in danger of exalting the new unduly. There are countries 
bound by custom, where "as it was, is now, and ever shall be" 
is the height of man's ambition. Of Infinite Perfection alone can 
this be said, and in our haste for improvement we rush to the 
other extreme, often thinking that because a thing is new it must 
be better than what went before. Here historical study comes 
in as a corrective. Often we find the thing that we thought new 
only an old project under a slightly different aspect. As an 
instance of what I mean, I mention a paper of 1780, which in its 
own neighborhood had some effect in the agitation for the estab- 
lishment of the gold standard in 1893 and 1894. All through 
the closing years of the eighteenth century Rhode Island was 
plunged in financial difficulties by the successive issues of paper 
money which it had no means of redeeming. The declaration 
to which I refer records on oath that a certain Colonel Segar 
XXXIII [ 5 ] 



HISTORY 

made a tender of $2,1^^ to Mr. William Knowlcs, of South 
Kingstown, to discharge two bonds and a note, but that 
"Knowles refused to take the same, saying that he would not 
take such trash as that was, but if said Samuel Segar would 
pay him in the same sort of money the said Segar had of said 
Knowlcs, he would take it." With this declaration the paper 
money tendered in payment was found, the whole making 
an impressive lesson in the evils of an inflated currency. One is 
ai)t to exclaim with Solomon that there is no new thing under 
the sun, in spite of our eager quest, and to believe that the past, 
if duly searched, could always furnish analogies and precedents 
for the present. We must know the past as a guide to the 
future, for not only docs the study of history give a firm founda- 
tion for growth, but it furnishes actual instances, full of helpful 
suggestion. 

There is no virtue we need to cultivate more than that of 
patriotism, America is a fair new world, and she welcomes 
many sons. What does she do with them? We are learning 
to our bitter grief it is not enough to receive them, to give 
them free air to breathe; they must be trained. The seeds of 
oppression and wrong sown in Poland and Russia may bear their 
bitter fruit fostered by our genial sun. The whole nation has 
been stirred to its very heart to see that this is possible. Given 
light and air, we had fondly supposed that anarchy and revenge 
would hide their heads and quickly die. And they will ; the 
forces of good are sure to win in the end; and the costly sacri- 
fice which has been laid on the altar of freedom will hasten 
that end. But have wv no responsibility? Should not the 
schools redouble their efforts ? Should not the teachers of his- 
tory especially draw lessons from the lives of patriots and lead- 
ers of the people which shall inspire a love of country, a pride 
in our native land, and a cheerful acquiescence in her laws ? We 
are led by example rather than precept; and hero-worship is a 
safe channel for the youthful imagination. Cannot our best 
men be made to live again before the minds of school children 
to stimulate and incite them to the practice of their vir- 
tues? 

You remember Browning's account of the chairs and tables 
XXXIII [ 6 ] 



HISTORY 

his father piled together for the siege of Troy, set him atop for 

Priam, 

called our cat 
Helen, enticed away from home he said 
By wicked Paris, who crouched somewhere close 
Under the footstool, being cowardly, 
But whom — since she was worth the pains, poor puss — 
Towzer and Tray, our dogs, the Atreidai, sought, 
By taking Troy to get possession of. 

This taught me who was who and what was what. 

So far I rightly understood the case 

At five years old; a huge delight it proved 

And still proves, thanks to that instructor sage. 

My father, who knew better than turn straight 

Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance. 

This, indeed, is the ideal method, to capture the young imag- 
ination, to give it noble and fine pictures to dwell upon, to lead 
the child's mind to the perception of truth and beauty. With 
the whole story of the world to choose from, there can hardly be 
any lack of material. A wise teacher must select and present 
to his scholars what arouses his own enthusiasm. One fine 
spirit can literally inspire many others. 

And if patriotism can be inculcated by a study of history, no 
less so can personal honor. Who can say how great an effect 
the romances of Sir Walter Scott have had in holding up pure 
and true characters to admiration, and in exposing the futility 
as well as the evils of a career of duplicity and deceit ? The 
modern historical novel, with its quicker movement and more 
terse style , fulfils its object in presenting a living picture of the 
time no better than the more leisurely tales of the great northern 
writer. Our own American historians have told their stories 
without the adventitious aids of romance, and yet have given us 
fascinating books, full of the deepest interest. The pages 
of Parkman need no embellishment of fiction to hold the closest 
attention. Scholarship and beauty of style are both exemplified 
by Motley, and John Fiske presents us one leader after another 
in clearly defined and exquisite portraiture. Surely from these 
storehouses our young people have treasures the value of which 
they have not fully appreciated; examples of right living and 
XXXIII [ 7 ] 



HISTORY 

high thinking which sho^ff become part of the mental furniture 
of each scholar. 

But to come to a more particular consideration of the effect 
of historical study upon character, I should say in the first place 
that it demands absolute accuracy. Even if historical study is 
pursued in the old dry-as-dust fashion, this mental habit must be 
fostered. There are still some people who regard long lists of 
the kings of England and a string of dates as being the sum of 
historical study. Partial as this view is, it has an element of 
truth, for the dates are pegs to hang our hats on — are very neces- 
sary for all subsequent and wider study. And learning them is 
good mental discipline. This accuracy lies at the foundation of 
character. Truth, exact truth, in so far as it can be learned, 
becomes the aim of the scholar. The accuracy which histori- 
cal study teaches is of especial value in such a community as 
ours, where the ordinary forms of speech run to humorous 
exaggeration. Who has not seen a child puzzled by some fanci- 
ful speech of an older person, not knowing whether to take it 
seriously or not ? Such surprising things are true, one cannot 
wonder that the youthful imagination will accept the wildest 
statements. We are as a people careless in our ordinary con- 
versation, loving hyperbole and suggestion. This gives piquancy 
and flavor to our intercourse with each other, and is delightful 
as a play of fancy, giving a shining and pleasant surface to 
society, but there must be a depth of current underneath these 
sparkling waves of thought, or the shallows become painfully 
apparent. A sound and accurate basis of fact is the first and 
foremost contribution which historical study makes to the culti- 
vated man. 

To the accuracy which such study teaches, perseverance must 
be added. All study, no matter how delightful, has its drudgery. 
We must pursue for the sake of the end in view very often, not 
for the pleasure of the immediate moment. This is hard to make 
a child reahze. He must simply do the work assigned him obe- 
diently, leaving the end to be gained out of sight ; an end which 
his parents and teachers can appreciate, but which he cannot 
yet see. Accuracy and perseverance must enter into all study, 
but without them historical study is impossible. These two are 
XXXIII [ 8 ] 



HISTORY 

certainly moral qualities most desirable to foster, most essential 
to the growth of a strong character. And with these two 
comes the use of the imagination. In childhood the imagina- 
tion is particularly strong. A little child often has no idea of 
what we call truth. The external world has not yet become 
real. Its own thoughts, its own fancies, are quite as real to it. 
The distinction between ''I did" and "I thought" does not yet 
exist. The external world takes hold slowly. This power of 
imagination which a child has can be trained and developed, and 
there are few better ways to do it than by historical reading. 
Here a basis is given for the play of the imagination. The child 
is not allowed to dissipate his fancies; there is some solid foun- 
dation; his thought, like a falcon, is held in leash and sent after 
its quarry. 

These qualities of accuracy, perseverance, and proper con- 
trol of the imagination all come into play at a little later period of 
historical work from that of which I have just been speaking, 
when a student is able to take up a problem for himself. It 
seems to me a most valuable thing to have a young student 
see for himself the sources of history. This can be done 
in most of our New England towns by an actual visit to the 
town record office. Dry and musty papers which are so dear 
to the heart of a historian may seem very prosaic and trivial to 
the young student; but give him a problem to work out, and let 
him find the real uses of the papers, and they quickly acquire a 
charm, and open the recesses of the past to him with an enchant- 
er's wand. In one school I know distinct problems have been 
set in local history — as to the existence of slavery, for instance, 
in that particular township; an inquiry as to the methods of 
apprenticeship, or the export of certain crops could be made, of 
which records can be obtained in the office of the town clerk. 
The records that I am most familiar with are in the keeping of a 
town clerk elected to that oflSce for many years, so that he has a 
personal pride and delight in the work. Nothing is more inter- 
esting to the young student than to be allowed to take down a 
volume of records of the eighteenth century kept in the fine cleri- 
cal hand of the period, and under the legal phraseology and cum- 
bersome repetition of names to discover the truth for which he 
xxxiii [ 9 ] 



HISTORY 

is seeking. In this pa^ltular record office there are deeds of 
gift from Samuel Sewall to the town, and I never shall forget the 
delight with which the discovery was finally made of the actual 
site and the actual conditions under which the meeting-house lot 
was presented to the town. 

In all such study the qualities which I have spoken of, 
unfailing accuracy never passing beyond the bounds of truth; 
steady perseverance to pursue the end sought ; and then a trained 
imagination enabling the student from bare facts to reconstruct 
the past, to form some rational theory as to why the man who 
made the deed did so, what his motives must have been, and 
how the final act was accepted by his neighbors ; all this involves 
and implies high capacity, and moral as well as intellectual 
power. 

The traveller in foreign countries notices this pride of locality. 
What Scotchman will not tell you the story of a border warfare 
or some midnight raid? How the Rhine teems with legends 
and tales of barons and knights! How replete is the storied 
land of Italy with interest and tales that appeal to the imagina- 
tion! Our own history, so far as it concerns the occupation of 
America by the Caucasian race, is brief, but it has its heroic 
episodes, and one of the great missions of the history teacher is 
to gather from this story. Unfortunately, where there is short 
continuity of family life, tradition, and legend, the penumbra of 
historic fact is sadly interrupted. It is this which gives poetry 
and charm to the life of a people. We, in New England, are 
far richer in this respect than any of our neighbors, with the 
possible exception of the Virginians. Here the bond to the old 
country is strongest; here the very names of our towns recall 
the counties of England: Gloucester, and Plymouth, and the 
west country names appear on our barren east shore. By no 
great stretch of the imagination we find our places in our Eng- 
lish homes as well as in our homes of New England, and I would 
caution our teachers of local history to try to make this con- 
nection. Without this we are in danger of regarding ourselves 
too much from an isolated point of view; we become excres- 
cences on the growth of the world rather than an integral part 
of it; an island set in the world's current, rather than a contrib- 

XXXIII [ TO ] 



HISTORY 

uting stream. And in magnifying our own history let us 
not forget the general history of our country. While the Revo- 
lution was being fought on the eastern coast, a peaceful revolu- 
tion was going on in the west, on the slopes of the Pacific, where 
the olive and the orange and the vine were being planted by 
pious hands, and a peaceful and mighty revolution in the old 
order of nature was taking place. When the Pilgrim fathers 
were landed in the East, already Spanish missionaries had pene- 
trated beyond our present southern border, and were scattering 
the seeds of Spanish civilization in what was to be our great 
western country. A little later the French came down from the 
North, meeting the civilization creeping up the great river, the 
artery of the new world, so that from many and diverse sources 
our present civilization has grown. New England was an 
important factor in this, but it becomes us New Englanders to 
be modest and recognize the origin of the other streams which 
have poured their life blood into our present commonwealth. 

In addition to the mental training to which the study of his- 
tory should contribute, there are other great moral lessons which 
it should teach. First, I would mention that the study of history 
inculcates the rule of law. Any wise student of history cannot 
fail to bring out in bold relief the necessity and wisdom of sub- 
mitting to law, and the inexorability of the law itself. Conse- 
quences follow unerringly upon the breaking of any of the great 
laws. Marie Antoinette was beheaded. This in itself is an iso- 
lated fact without special significance to the young student's 
mind. Let him inquire into the causes of this event; let him 
understand something of the condition of the French people be- 
fore the Revolution — of their rights trampled upon, of the ar- 
rogant assumption of power by the nobles — and he will see that 
some such fact as this was the logical outcome of the conditions; 
that the great law of the sovereignty of the people must assert 
itself; that it could not be kept under. There have been 
triumphs of injustice, there have been times of terrible misrule, 
but the reign of law has been vindicated, the results of anarchy 
have been overthrown. 

And in a country like ours reverence is another virtue which 
history teaches us, and which we are in especial need of learning. 

XXXIII [ II ] 



HISTORY 

We are apt to sec the hui#R-ous side of things too clearly. The 
typical American hides his feelings under some light and flip- 
pant exclamation. We are hardly old enough yet to dare to be 
as reverent as we truly are. It takes poise and security of one's 
own position to be absolutely simple, for simplicity, far from 
being the simple thing that seems, often comes to us through 
complexity. It is history and historical study which should 
teach us reverence. For is not reverence at the foundation of 
all respect? To respect the right of others which lies at the 
foundation of all true democracy, one must have a reverent spirit, 
a spirit which can see and revere all that is good and right, 
though presented in very varying conditions, and with no adven- 
titious aids of outward circumstances. "A man's a man for a' 
that " lies at the root of free institutions.. In respect for the life 
of men, in reverence for the aims of the spirit of man, history is 
best qualified to instruct us. It is the Hfe of the great men who 
have gone before us which is our greatest inspiration. Their 
life and their character still live in the world. We who have 
come after can only accept what is good in them with devout 
thankfulness, and try to imitate their virtues. 

And the highest and best of all the teachings of history should 
be reverence for truth. Truth is so many-sided; she veils 
her face behind so many veils. But what can be more in- 
spiring than the search for truth? As we see a little further, 
as we redouble our efforts to find her, do we not receive the 
highest reward and the highest incentive to our study? The 
whole of life is so closely woven together that what seems an 
isolated event is of vital importance and connection with what 
goes before and what comes after. To see a little farther, to 
trace some unknown connection, what greater reward can any 
study offer, what higher satisfaction ? As the painter before his 
landscape sees more and more of beauty, as to his trained eye 
the shadows become full of living color, and his subject glows 
with more than the light of day, as exquisite relations and unseen 
beauties reveal themselves, so with the historical student. The 
period of his study becomes vital with living interest. Facts 
group themselves about the central events, side lights are thrown 
by contemporary documents, truth becomes more lovely and 

XXXIII [ 12 ] 



HISTORY 

more alluring as the ultimate foundations recede before the eager 
search, and hide themselves in the mysterious recesses of the 
human will. But to gain one little point, to establish one small 
link in the great chain of the growth of the world, what delight 
can be keener, what quest more honorable? For "what has 
been ever shall be," better, larger, more inclusive. Good in by- 
gone days may not be just our good, but its quality cannot 
change, though we spell it differently. We must be saved 
because we cling 

" To the same, same self, same love, 
Same God; ay, what was shall be." 

It is the passion for truth which is the scholar's passion, and 
the promise of truth which is the scholar's highest reward. If 
we look for truth in times that have gone by; if we look for it 
in the history of our own place and our own local habitation, 
shall we not reverence it more and more in our own lives? 
Shall we not appreciate that we too are making history, and that 
we must make it on the side of righteousness ? 

Is this too much to expect of the study of history ? It should 
give a background for the whole of life, it should furnish a 
working theory of the advance of the world. It is not a fixed 
science; constant contributions are made to it by research and 
by philosophy. New schools are constantly arising among its 
votaries, but its basis is on fact, and its growth is the growth of 
the Hfe of man. It teaches us great lessons, lessons at the 
foundation of right thinking and right living, the immuta- 
bility of law, reverence, and the love of truth. These are 
lessons worth the learning, lessons which carry their reward with 
them in the promise of future growth and achievement. These 
are lessons woven into the very texture of freedom, without 
which there can be no stability. " Ye shall know the truth, and 
the truth shall make you free." 



XXXIII [ 13 ] 



XXXIV 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

''RELIGION STILL THE KEY TO HISTORY" 

BY 

SIMEON EBEN BALDWIN 

FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION; PROFESSOR OF 
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, YALE UNIVERSITY 



CT^HE thought of peace is ever closely associate, m our 
minds with the thought of religion. Ij peace and good 
will to man are ever really to rule the earth, it must be largely 
by the force of religion, that is, by faith and aspiration, that the 
mighty triumph shall be accomplished. To many men, looking 
back on the days of an imperious, iron-clad church, summoning 
the force of armies and inquisitions to impose her will upon 
emperors and nations, the power of religion has seemed to be 
grown faint. It has even become common to cry out against 
our age as one of doubt and little faith. Yet if we will read 
beneath the surface, if we will accept here the guidance of a 
specialist in the field of both law and history, we shall learn of 
other views, of subtler, deeper truths as to what religion does 
and yet shall do in moulding life. 

Professor Baldwin is not only the late retiring President of 
the American Historical Association, before whose most recent 
annual meeting this address was delivered. He is also Pro- 
fessor of Constitutional Law at Yale University, and a Judge of 
the Supreme Court of Connecticut. Such a man is to be led 
astray neither by sentiment nor by superficial analysis; and 
when he declares the power and influence of religion to be of such 

XXXIV [ I ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

weight as he here asse^^ those oj us who have dismissed the 
subject as an obsolete or dying one must revise our judgments — 
or defend thetn against the Judge. 

There are three men in the world whose daily doings and 
sayings especially interest it — the Emperor William, President 
Roosevelt, and the Pope of Rome. Two command public 
attention by the union of great official powers with strong 
native faculties of mind and will. The third commands it 
almost purely from his official character. He governs no 
territory, although his authority is daily felt in the remotest 
quarters of the globe, and he holds a court to which great 
nations send ambassadors. In the sphere where he does bear 
rule, he has evinced no faculty of individual initiative. He 
has no force of speech, no power of the pen. The son of a 
simple peasant, his greatness consists in his headship of a 
venerable and world-wide church, and in his thus standing, 
more than any other man, as the representative of a great 
religion. 

Lamprecht tells us that history is "an sich nichts als ange- 
wandte Psychologic." To this extent certainly the epigram 
rings true that history can never neglect to take into account 
whatever psychological forces move peoples or actuate leaders 
of peoples. Such a force has always been found, is still found, 
in religion. It is one of those — vague, impulsive, constant in 
play, inconstant in intensity — which deny to the historical 
student the power of scientific prediction. 

Ours is an age of more reVerence for human reason and less 
reverence for human authority. But as reverence for human 
authority becomes less, a conviction deepens that men are 
subject to a power greater than themselves. We may call it 
Nature, or call it God. What we know is that it speaks by 
laws — invariable laws. What we feel is that it is a thing of 
mystery — too great to be measured from earth; too far from 
man, near though it be at every step, to be so much as seen in 
all its outline by his philosophy. 

The relation of history to religion has been greatly changed 
during the last two centuries. What we call modern history, 
XXXIY [ 2 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

and distant times may deem to be that of the Middle Ages, had 
its real beginning when modern government arose, and that 
was when the peoples of France and the United States, as they 
gathered in the fruits of their revolutions, pronounced that 
absolute religious liberty was one. Civil liberty and popular 
government were no new things in the world. A state without 
a church was. Guizot has said that Democracy was intro- 
duced into Europe by a foreign missionary named Paul. If 
this be so, it was a democracy whose motive and sphere were 
religious. Political democracy dissevered from religion was 
to come seventeen centuries later. 

It was to take from religion its legal authority, but only to 
strengthen its moral power. Until the "ideas of 1789" took 
formal shape, history had been the record of what the few did 
with the help of the many. It has since been the record of 
what the many do, with the help of the few. It may well be 
that at some time the leaders — the few who are in authority 
in any nation — may be careless of religion. The many — or, at 
the least, the whole people — never will be. If a majority 
should be indifferentists or irreligious, the minority will be all 
the more devoted to the cause to which they attribute a sacred 
character. 

Religion offers in statecraft a means of resting policy upon 
principle. It is, as Talleyrand has said, only when rested 
upon principle that a policy can endure.^ The principles 
sanctioned by the religion of the time are incontestable. Later 
times may discard them. But to each generation of any 
people the principles instilled by ministers of religion under 
the sanction of the church will permeate society and become 
a part of its being — of what in the truest sense is its political 
constitution. 

I use religion to signify something real, and not less real 
because to one set of men it is one thing, to another set another 
thing. It does not seem to me that Renan was right when he 
said that "Les religions, comme les philosophies, sont toutes 
vaines; mais la religion, pas plus que la philosophic, n'est 

^Memoirs, Putnam's edition, II. 124. 

XXXIV [ 3 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

vainc."^ No religion 4^ wholly vain. Each is true to its 
disciples, and in its truth to them inspires their lives. History 
has to do with all religions, because it has to do with all men. 

Every great religion has come at the beginning with a resist- 
less power. It comes as the expression by some clear-sighted, 
high-strung leader of men of what has long lain confusedly in 
the minds of many of his fellow countrymen, now first really 
disclosed to them and clothed with a light and power that is 
wholly new. There is a truth in it, or it would not be great; 
and truth endures. 

Such a religion has a beginning, but it will have no end 
until the national ideas of the peoples to whom it has presented 
a new conception of life are radically changed. It worked a 
social revolution when it first appeared, but the shock of it 
then, however great, was less of a world force than the trembling, 
far-diffused, which in after years and ages has marked its 
continued life. It is a permanent addition to the energies of 
civilization. 

As a key to history, religion has changed its form since the 
overthrow of the ancient order of things that marked the close 
of the eighteenth century; but its strength remains the same. 

Once that strength was largely found in the power of an 
established church, or of a sentiment of opposition to an es- 
tablished church. Now it is coming more from the force of 
the principles for which, at bottom, churches stand, in in- 
fluencing general public opinion. 

Once it received large expression in the fine arts, brought 
to the service of ecclesiasticism. The pyramids, the Greek 
temple no less than the Gothic cathedral, the paintings of the 
masters of former days, in Asia as well as Europe, the great 
music of the past, were all its offspring. To-day these arts 
turn for the most part elsewhere for their inspiration and 
ideals. 

The artist is tired of the anthropomorphism by which his 
predecessors degraded the divine. The architect is planning, 
the decorator is adorning, museums, libraries, lecture halls, 

* Histoirc du Pcuplc d'lsracl, I. xxviii. 
XXXIV [ 4 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

statehouses, more than churches. The composer meets every 
mood. But there is here, too, a line that never can be passed. 
A school of art may be non-religious. It cannot be irreligious, 
and endure. 

Once religion led to alliances of nations for no other cause 
than that they shared the same form of it, and wished, perhaps, 
to secure it a wider spread. Against such connections the 
Peace of Westphaha, with its rule of cujus regio, ejus religio, 
shut one door, and the futile outcome of the Holy Alliance 
closed another. In international affairs the distinction between 
Christian and infidel has passed away as fully as that between 
Greek and barbarian; but that which is vital to all religions 
and common to all religions is but the more clearly seen and 
strongly felt. 

History has a place in "the literature of power." It has it 
only by right of the human motive that controls events and the 
imagination that can see and paint it. 

There was a half-truth in what Sir Edward Burne- Jones 
once said, that there were but four English historians : Shakes- 
peare, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray. There is no historian 
who is not an artist. He must tell his story in a large way. 
He is concerned with what is in essence part of a long process. 
Facts, as Macaulay puts it, are the dross of history. Their 
relations to us are what is to be fined out, and when these are 
found in religion something great has at once come in to dignify 
the work. 

Herbert Spencer has said that in the fine arts "a work . . . 
which is full of small contrasts and without any great contrasts 
sins against the fundamental principles of beauty." * The 
thought may be extended to historical literature. There must 
be great contrasts to make any particular history effective. 
But more than this, it is only so far as it presents great con- 
trasts that any history, be it particular or universal, is true. 
They are its soul. They are the moving cause of the trivial 
events and common course of things which conceal them from 
general observation. 

1 Autobiography, II. 408. 

XXXIV [ 5 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

Such contrasts, in 0bsc states of society with which the 
historian has to deal, enter into each human life. They come 
from those two things which, as Kant said, fill every man with 
a certain awe — the starry heavens and the still, small voice 
of his own conscience. This conscience may be largely a 
product of human evolution. It means little or nothing to 
the savage. The starry heavens mean little to him. But he 
is impressed by the inborn or from birth intraincd conviction 
that there are higher and unseen powers, one or many, from 
whom something is to be feared or gained. Man enters or- 
ganized society without losing this conviction. He feels him- 
self bound to something higher and stronger. The bond may 
easily become a fetter, but on the whole it makes life larger 
and less selfish. 

What is natural to man is inherited from generation to 
generation. Whatever he has acquired — be it of thought or 
knowledge — must be taught over again by each generation to 
the next, if it is to endure. Religion is part of his nature — a 
spiritual possession which education does not give, except in 
form, and seldom takes away. 

That the religion of every race has, down to recent times, 
gone far to shape its history, few will dispute. Does its con- 
trolling influence on national conditions pass away before a 
higher civilization and a wider knowledge? May it be a key 
to the fife of a tribe of savages, but only as an incident of im- 
maturity and ignorance? Does the key grow rusty, as time 
goes on? Or is the religious motive one of the inherent, uni- 
versal, and eternal forces that must, in all ages, deeply affect, 
if not vitally control, the doings of men, as massed in nations, 
in matters of national concern? 

Perhaps the answer hangs on what the religious motive is. 
If it be to secure some personal good, whether here or here- 
after, for one's self or one's family, it will be inevitably weakened 
by advances in civilization. All those advances are toward 
altruism. Altruism proceeds trom the spirit of self-sacrifice, 
and that is the highest spring of religion. "Selfish and in- 
terested individualism," says John Morley, "has been truly 
called non-historic. Sacrifice has been the law — sacrifice for 
XXXIV [ 6 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

creeds, for churches, for dynasties, for kings, for adored teachers, 
for native land."^ 

It is this spirit which gives all its nobility to the story of 
our race. As it brought all Christendom together in the 
Crusades, so it brought the civilized world together in the 
Conference of Peace at The Hague in 1899. In each of these 
great movements it was distinctly associated with religion — 
blindly in the one, truly in the other. That the ancient dis- 
tinction between Christian and infidel found no place in the 
rescript of the Czar, which led to the Hague Conference, was 
of itself some proof of its essentially rehgious motive.^ 

Thus far in the history of the earth, the mass of mankind 
have ever sought to regulate their conduct by their desires. 
Civilization has somewhat modified their desires. It has 
given them new forms, inspired them by new influences, turned 

^"Democracy and 'Reaction,'- Nineteeifith Century, April, 1905 
(vol. 57, p. 547)- 

^At a critical moment in the proceedings of the Hague Conference 
of 1899, there came into the hands of the president of the American 
delegation a letter sent out by the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of 
Texas to the clergy of his diocese with a form of prayer to be used 
in all the churches, asking the blessing of God on the work of the 
Conference in the interests of peace. The Emperor of Germany had 
instructed his representatives to oppose the institution of any court 
of arbitration. Mr. White was at the time preparing a despatch 
to the German Prime Minister urging him to use his influence to 
secure a reconsideration of the question. He referred to the letter 
of the Bishop as an important utterance of a widely prevailing Chris- 
tian sentiment, which could not be disregarded, and also handed it 
to the bearer of the despatch, his associate, the late Dr. Holls, to use 
as he might think best. Dr. Holls showed it to the Chancellor, Prince 
Hohenlohe, who — a strong religionist — was evidently affected by it. 
Not long afterward, the German delegation took a position favor- 
able to the treaty of arbitration, and Mr. White refers to the incident 
as "perhaps an interesting example of an indirect 'answer to prayer.' " 
Autobiography of Andrew D. White, II. 311, 322. 

We have his authority also for the statement that religion in 
a curious way dictated the original call for the Hague Conference. 
The Czar acted in the matter on the advice of Pobedonostseff. Pobe- 
donostseff desired a reduction of armaments as the only means which 
he could see to give Russia the means to increase her grants for the 
benefit of the state church. Ibid., 269-270. 

XXXIV [ 7 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

them in new direction^^fubjected them to certain conventions; 
but individual desires are still what press forward as the natural 
motive forces in and of organized society. 

Nevertheless, they have seldom for any long period ruled 
the course of society. There has been a minority of the people, 
actuated by counterforces of an intensive character and power, 
sufficient to make it stronger than the majority in so far as to 
beat down mere desire and replace it by some theory which 
all recognize as more noble and worthy. Philosophers have 
led one wing of this minority; religionists the other. And 
which has proved the stronger force, religion or philosophy? 
Which appeals to the most minds? Which appeals to the 
most hearts? To the heart, religion alone. The morals, the 
ideals of the philosopher, are powerless with the multitude 
unless touched by the fire of emotion and quickened by that 
faith in the unseen which turns human things into divine things. 

The philosophic thought of Eastern literature is also 
religious. The effect of this literature on the Western mind 
has become, during the last half-century, quite considerable. 
It has reinforced the Emersonian school and given new rec- 
ognition to reverence for the mysterious in the order of the 
universe. 

Religion, being man's conception of what is fit for a super- 
human or divine order of things, must vary in form to cor- 
respond with differences in human insight and knowledge. 
Following the general law for all that lives, formulated by 
Spencer and Darwin, it everywhere proceeds in its manifesta- 
tions from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and must 
continue in this course. It is not that the ultimate object of 
search changes. The attitudes and capacities of the observers 
change. If any particular religion ever overspreads the earth 
and gains universal acceptance, it will gain it everywhere by 
taking its color, Hke the chameleon, from the soil, or perhaps, 
as to-day with the Christian religion, assuming many colors 
on the same soil. Only the motive and the general moral 
product will be cosmic. 

Men owe to their mothers their first introduction to the 
XXXIV \ 8 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

world of the mind and the spirit. Women are, by their inherent 
nature, religious beings. Equality of civil rights before the 
law will never disturb the poise of that nature. It is never 
satisfied to be ensphered within itself. It seeks to ally itself 
with something stronger. It responds readily to the mysterious. 
In a sense it is true that the life of every man turns on what is 
to be his relation to some woman. In a much deeper sense is 
it true that the life of every woman turns on what is to be her 
relation to some man. If happiness of home be denied to a 
man, he may find, or fancy that he finds, the void filled in the 
busy world. If it be denied to a woman, she cannot. She 
feels the void too deep to fill, unless it be by a peace that the 
world can neither give nor take away. And if happiness of 
home be given to a woman, she is more apt than man to think 
it but a gift from some higher power. 

These sentiments that from childhood imbue half the human 
race, that half instils in childhood into the whole. The first 
knowledge that comes to the babe in arms is that there is a 
protecting and supporting power, from which he receives 
everything, and to which he renders nothing but confidence and 
love. He grows into a child. Other forms rise up around 
him with which he finds himself in close relation. Motives 
of conduct are put before him; duty to parents among the 
first. There are few to whom a mother's voice does not sug- 
gest a reason for this duty in a divine command. The very 
oaths the boy V;ill hear uttered upon the street will bear the 
same message in a different dress. 

A race, as Renan said, lives forever on its recollections of 
childhood. Impressions of religion then gained are never 
absolutely effaced. Like the secret despatch written in lemon 
juice, they reappear at the touch of fire — in moments of 
deep feeling and supreme effort. It is by what is done at 
such moments that battles are won, parliamentary majorities 
change, dynasties fall. 

The most uncompromising materialist is seldom without 

his obligations to early impressions for his contentment with his 

surroundings. There will be still, though he be not conscious 

of it, some fingering subjection to their power. As Dr. Barry 

XXXIV [ 9 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

in his sketch of Rcnan )^ said, "the sceptic lives on a capital 
stored up during the days when he believed. He is a philoso- 
pher on half-pay." 

Religion is a large word. Matthew Arnold's epigram 
expresses but a half-truth. Religion is morality — the morahty 
of the time and of the race — touched with emotion — the emotion 
of the human heart. But as emotion is not self-contained, 
neither is it self -produced. It is a feeling of one toward another 
or with another, or else it is a feeling inspired by a memory 
of another or a conception of the ideal. The one is the more 
passionate : the other is the more profound. Either is a strong 
spring of action. But one is of the earth: the other transcends 
the earth. Each has often turned the course of history. It has 
been suddenly and sharply turned by emotions that belong to 
the present, that avv^oke or were awakened by like emotion in 
another. It has seldom been permanently turned or per- 
manently guided by these. That is the work of the emotions 
fed by the unseen; emotions for which we owe nothing to our 
senses, nothing to ourselves. For if man is the measure of the 
universe, it is only because he sees that it is immeasurable, and 
feels that there is something immeasurable within himself 
which is a part of the immeasurable beyond himself. This 
feeling, this emotion of the heart, passing into a conviction 
of the mind, is the quickening spirit that makes our customs 
or morals flower into religion. 

Theologians, speaking for their realm of science, call it, 
as it appears there, faith — or perhaps faith in those who pro- 
fess the doctrines to which they adhere; superstition, in other 
men. Historians, as it appears in their realm of science, all 
see it in loyalty to national ideals, reverence for national in- 
stitutions, veneration for the heroes of the past. All of them, 
I think it may be fairly said, have not been as ready to ac- 
knowledge its rightful power over a people when it turns their 
thoughts toward that transcendent energy which those call 
divine who feel that it brings them into a personal relation with 
the unseen and the unknowable. 

It may take the shape of pure theism. It may find divinity 
shining through a human form. It may find it in every man. 
XXXIV [ lO ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

The modern world, so far as the leaders of its thought can 
speak for it, is less confident than the world of a thousand or 
ten thousand years ago that there exists a being detached from 
all else so like ourselves that we can name it like one of us, 
a person, and presume to define its attributes in terms of human 
speech. It is more confident that there is a power in the uni- 
verse that so controls or constitutes it in a settled order of re- 
lations and causation that all may safely trust in the continuance 
of that order without a break. It is more confident also that 
it is a power that, in the sum of things, makes for what is good 
as well as true and is worthy the highest name we can invent 
for it — the name of God. 

If there be anything in the theory of the monist; if there 
be but one actuality in the universe, and that motion, or a force 
expressed in motion, the manner of that motion is, or seems to 
us, ruled by attraction. Attraction draws little things to great 
things : earths to suns ; men — for their bodies — to the earth ; but 
for their thinking selves it is still the dominating faith that 
these are in like manner, if insensibly, yet surely, drawn toward 
a greater thinking self, as source and end. 

Ruskin said of Sainte-Beuve that he never for a moment 
admitted to himself the possibility of a True as well as an Ideal 
Spirit, or God.* It is precisely this which threw Sainte-Beuve 
out of touch with the people about him, and shut him out of 
the public heart. Spencer built on better foundations. His 
own conceptions might differ widely from those of English 
people. He might declare that "that which persists, unchang- 
ing in quantity but ever changing in form, under these sensible 
appearances which the Universe presents to us, transcends 
human knowledge and conception — is an unknown and unknow- 
able Power, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit 
in space and without beginning or end in time."^ But if un- 
knowable to him, this Power was not one with which he 
would lightly reckon as respects its influence on others. As 
Frederic Harrison said — and said rightfully — Spencer "looked 
to the unknowable environment behind the world of sense 

* Letters to Charles Eliot Norton, II. 13. ^ Autobiography, I. 652. 
XXXIV [ II ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

and knowledge as the 4^cre and object of religion." To 
the positivist, the unknowable environment is no less an ad- 
mitted fact, but — to use Harrison's language again — "the only- 
intelligible sphere of religion must be the knowable," and "the 
elements of the unknowable are immutably set in the canons of 
experience." 

The church of the world stands nearer to Spencer. It dis- 
dains the dogma that the knowable is immutably measured 
by any form of human experience. The world in general 
rejects it. It is unscientific. Who would have said, a cen- 
tury ago, that the voice of a friend speaking in Denver could 
be heard in New York, and recognized in every intonation 
as easily as if he were in the same room with him w^ho is ad- 
dressed? Who would have said, twenty years ago, that a ray 
of light could be so framed and directed as to hght up the 
interior of the human body and show the skeleton within 
it ? Who would have said, ten years ago, that there was a heat- 
producing mineral that never cooled ? What canons of scien- 
tific experience brought within the range of probable assump- 
tion marvels like these? Surely it is but reasonable to expect 
that the common people will look at each new discovery of such 
a kind as fresh proof of an intelligent creator, and another 
step nearer to knowledge of what He is. 

The full power of such a belief is seldom felt by those who 
are themselves unaffected by it. For this cause, if for no 
other, the historian whose judgments will be accepted by 
future generations must write in a religious spirit. He cannot 
use a key too large for him to grasp. I mean here by religion 
a reverent consciousness of ?. power (be it law or spirit) mani- 
fest in nature, which is stronger than man, and a sense of 
obligation to answer its demands. Its common fruits, ripened 
by human association, have through all historic times been 
what in those times passed for collective virtue and self-sacrifice. 
The historian must respect these qualities. He must share in 
them, so far at least as to recognize them in others, and recognize 
their controlling force. 

George Sand makes her Marquis de Villcmer declare that 
"Jamais une conscience troublee, jamais un esprit fausse 

XXXIV [ 12 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

n'entendront I'histoire." It will be always inclining to search 
out or invent some unworthy motive, some low design, in the 
greatest acts. It cannot comprehend that in which it has no 
part. Nor can the man whose conscience is untroubled and 
spirit true, but to whom himself the religious motive is a stranger, 
appreciate what may be its mastery of others. Particularly 
is this true where behind the religious motive is the conviction 
of the personality of God. He to whom the divine stands as 
a being detached from all beside, will go farther and dare more 
for the love of God or fear of God than the man to whom the 
divine transcends all personality and permeates whatever 
the universe contains. The very conception of such an im- 
manence of God in the world is at once too vast and too subtle 
for the ordinary mind. It diffuses a power which the other 
conception concentrates. It turns a guide into a theory. 

If mankind is always craving heroes to worship, much 
more it craves a King of Kings, eternal in the heavens. The 
thought of unity in nature — of a single purpose or power to 
which aU that we see or know or feel is related — is common to 
most of the great religions. It is also a vital part of them. 
To those who are possessed by it, it seems a clew by which to 
trace back every event of history to its farthest source. It is 
distinctly a religious clew. 

It naturally associates itself with the thought of unity in 
human authority. 

To the Mahometan, rehgion is still the centraHzing force 
in government that it was for a thousand years to the Christian 
world. Mediaeval Europe could conceive only of one spiritual 
head and of one imperial head on earth. It was this sentiment 
that kept the Holy Roman Empire in hfe centuries after, as 
Voltaire declared, it was no longer Holy, nor Roman, nor an 
Empire. 

Convince the mass of any people that a change of custom 
or of law or no change of custom or law, that a war or no war, 
the maintenance of an ancient policy or the substitution of 
another, the support of an existing government or its over- 
throw, is demanded by duty to God, and you have a motive 
of action that is likely to prove irresistible. It is a motive easy 
XXXIV [ 13 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

to apprehend, and thcrd^R-c always those who arc ready to 
suggest it. Not only are they ready, but they have a vantage 
ground which gives to what they say peculiar weight. It is that 
of the church. 

Between man and religion stands everywhere something in 
the nature of ecclesiastical authority, either self-asserted or 
governmentally affirmed. The formalism in religion which 
naturally results from an established church makes for con- 
servatism in politics. In proportion to the hold which such 
a church has on the community it saps the springs of popular 
enthusiasm and makes against business activity. Time which 
would otherwise be spent in labor is consumed in feast-days or 
fast-days. Leisure is gained, but at high cost and under cir- 
cumstances unfriendly to its best use. In public educational 
institutions studies of more importance are apt to be put aside 
for instruction in the symbols and liturgies of the church. 

The same tendencies proceed in all countries from churches 
to which a large majority of the people belong, though not 
estabhshed by law, if they are ceremonial in their institutions. 
This cause has colored the Hfe of the people and vitally af- 
fected the course of industry in Spanish America ^ and British 
India. 

There are twenty American republics. Two of them, Cuba 
and San Domingo, are bound to us by political ties of a peculiar 
character. The rest shun us. We want their trade, but it 
goes to Europe. We want their sympathy, but what we re- 
ceive is rather apprehension and suspicion. We meet them in 
Pan-American Congresses, but while projects are framed 
few are consummated. Why is it that, with their political 
institutions so largely copied from us, they are foreign to us 
in spirit? Race and language, I believe, have been less the 
cause than religion. Religion counts more with them in 
influencing habits of thought and measures of social order. 
The church, as such, is a greater power. 

In South America and Central America the church was 

' A striking, and not inaccurate, forecast of its probable history 
was made in a letter from Jefferson to Lafayette, of May 14, 181 7. 
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial edition, XV. 116. 
XXXIV [ 14 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

so long the only fountain of education that public sentiment 
deemed it a suflicient source. There are countries in which the 
state has assumed this function, where churches have been 
found to promote its efforts for their own sake. In Finland, 
for instance, in the Lutheran denomination, which there pre- 
vails, confirmation is refused to those who cannot read, and 
the consequence is that illiteracy is rare. So in a conquered 
country, if an established church survives, it may prove a nur- 
sery of patriotism. Modern Greece as an independent king- 
dom owes its existence to the Greek Church. This kept alive 
the national feeling and tongue during the long years of Turkish 
occupation.* 

The church appeals to what is poetic in our nature, and as 
our associate President ^ Woodrow Wilson has finely said: "We 
live by Poetry; and not by Prose." 

But the only true establishment of a church is in the hearts 
of those who belong to it. If they have faith in its principles, 
these will have a large influence in guiding their action as 
citizens in public affairs. Fear of its discipline, be it established 
or unestablished, will not. 

The attitude of every important church toward socialism is 
antagonistic. If it become official antagonism, it loses power. 
Why is socialism steadily growing in political weight through- 
out Europe? Why in France did its friends cast nearly half 
a million more votes at the elections of this year than in any 
previous one ? It is a sign of the decadence there of the power 
of the Vatican, pushed unwisely to the front in its encyclicals. It 
was a natural incident of the struggle which was separating 
church and state. As Professor Blondel has said of it: "Le 
peuple frangais est sans doute moins irreligicux qu'on ne le 
pretend c^uelquefois, mais il est tres defiant a I'egard de tout ce 
qui lui apparait comme une ingerence cl6ricale, et n'accorde 
pas volontiers sa confiance a ceux qu'il soup^onne de sympathie 
a I'egard du 'gouvcrnement des cures.' "^ 

* Autobiography of Andrew D. White, II. 439. 
^Associate President of the American Historical Association. 
^ Blatter filr vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft und V olkswirtschafts- 
lehre, July, 1906, p. 178. 

XXXIV [ 15 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

The jealousy of clcrMpl government on the part of the 
French people, however, is largely because they have learned 
to look on it as a government inspired from Rome, subject to 
Rome. 

One of last year's books bears the title "Les Deux Frances." 
They are the France of the Blacks and the France of the Reds; 
of the party of King and Church, and that of Revolution. A 
party standing for old institutions cannot easily be displaced 
by a party standing for new institutions, unless these rise up 
as the outcome and expression of a spirit of individualism, 
native to the soil. If each party rests for its support on corpo- 
rate influences, the struggle will be long and doubtful. There 
are still therefore les deux Frances^ ever in conflict. The King 
— the thought of a restored monarchy — has almost disappeared 
as a constitutive force. But so has the Revolution. To that 
the corporate influences of the Republic have succeeded, and 
to-day it is the France of the Church contending with the France 
of the Republic. If the church should learn to encourage the 
individual initiative of its followers^ — to let Frenchmen direct 
the course in France of the Roman Church — the France of the 
Blacks may yet prevail. 

The history of any people will be largely governed by its 
means of education. How far shall it extend? By whom 
shall it be furnished and controlled? "Educate your masters" 
is the command of political philosophy to the modern state. 
No education can be deemed complete which does not treat 
to some extent of religion. Yet if it be given at public expense, 
the cost will be borne by some who scout at all religion, and 
many who disagree with the prevailing forms of it. 

The position which the world is gradually taking on this 
subject rests on principles foreshadowed in colonial Maryland 
and Rhode Island; first formally asserted by any government 
on purely humanitarian grounds in 1786 by Jefferson's statute of 
religious liberty in Virginia, and spread over a wider field by 
the Constitution of the United States. 

The utmost point that had been previously reached was 
that religious liberty should be as great as the safety of the 
XXXIV [ 16 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

state permitted. Now it was declared that no limitations were 
required by the safety of the state. Yet here more than almost 
anywhere else is seen the difficulty of reconciling it with reHgious 
sentiment. 

The King of Bavaria, in a state paper early in the last cen- 
tury, declared that in public education religion was not to 
be taught at the cost of learning, nor yet learning at the cost of 
religion. There are still many, however, who believe it to be 
to the cost of learning for the state to assume to teach that, 
without making religion a part of it. 

More than a million children are being educated in the 
United States every year in the various schools of the Roman 
Catholic Church. The cost of this can hardly be less than 
twenty-five or thirty million dollars. Those who pay it are 
also required by the state to contribute as much as any other 
taxpaying citizens to the support of the pubhc schools. It is 
no small force which leads these men to assume such burdens. 
It is the conviction that education is incomplete unless religion 
be taught as part of it, added to the belief that the best form of 
religion, or we might say perhaps the only form of true religion, 
is that of which their own church is the expression. 

Holland has profited by our experience, and since 1857 
has forbidden religious instruction in her public schools. The 
Catholics were not content to have it given by Calvinists, nor 
Calvinists to let it come from Catholics. Similar considerations, 
fortified by an influence substantially unfelt in Holland, that 
of socialism, have now thoroughly secularized education in 
France, but only after the most bitter contests. In both English 
and Canadian politics the same question is now the dominating 
one. 

The position of Russia in this respect has been one of 
the circumstances weakening her as a great power as well 
as leading directly to revolutionary change. The church has 
had the full direction of the public schools. For the first three 
years it kept the children simply learning prayers by lote, 
except for a little drill toward the close in mental arithmetic. 
No instruction in reading was required. The product of such 
a system is not simply popular unintelligence. It is an unreal 
XXXIV [ 17 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

quietude, easily passing^o a blind fury, under the influences 
of a century like ours. 

Religious tests for ordinary offices have been largely 
abolished, even in monarchical governments, but whenever 
in these there is a state church the monarch, as its head, re- 
mains bound to it by vows so solemn as to prove the conviction 
of the people that nothing can safely be yielded there. The 
coronation oath of King Edward stood for the same dogmatic 
rigidity in its reference to the papacy as did that of an opposite 
kind imposed on his niece, the Princess Ena, before she could be 
Queen of Spain.^ 

There is no civilized nation in recent years where the state 
supports the church in which there has not been so much 
dissatisfaction with that policy as to inspire public opposition. 
In many, the opposition has already triumphed: in all, it will. 
The disestablishment of the church in Ireland, in the face of 
the solemn provision to the contrary in the Act of Union, will 
some day be followed by the disestablishment of the Church 
of England, whose numbers have recently sunk to a minority of 
the Enghsh people. In France, the separation of the state 
from the churches, first in regard to education, and then at 
all points, has been the great pohtical issue for a quarter of a 
century. The French Revolution could not accompHsh it. 
Though in the Constitution of 1791 it was asserted that all the 
property of the church belonged to the nation, and the Con- 



^ This was: "I, recognizing as true the Catholic and apostolic 
faith, do hereby publicly anathematize every heresy, especially that 
to which I have had the misfortune to belong. I agree with the Holy 
Roman Church, and profess with mouth and heart my belief in the 
Apostolic See, and my adhesion to that faith which the Holy Roman 
Church, by evangehcal and apostolical authority, delivers to be held. 
Swearing this by the sacred Homoousion, or trinity of the same sub- 
stance, and by the holy gospels of Christ, I do pronounce those worthy 
of eternal anathema who oppose this faith with their dogmas and their 
followers, and should I myself at any time presume to approve or 
proclaim anything contrary hereto, I will subject myself to the severity 
of the canon law. So help me God, and these his holy gospels." 
XXXIV [ 18 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

cordat ten years later confirmed it, it was only in this present 
year that France ventured seriously to stand upon her title. 

A church to which the mass of any people belongs will exert 
a stronger influence on them than on their leaders in civil af- 
fairs. These leaders will be better fitted to exercise an inde- 
pendent judgment. They will be more moved by motives 
of personal ambition. Religion will not be to them the one 
thing to elevate their thoughts beyond the narrow round of 
domestic life. 

But of those who direct affairs in any nation in which govern- 
ment formally avows and teaches in its schools the existence of 
a higher spiritual power few will escape the conviction that in 
this at least there is truth. A belief in God leads to a trust in God 
in great emergencies, and to an inspiring identification of God 
and country. In war, this motive is as strong to-day as it 
was a thousand years ago. The " Cambridge Modern History," 
after giving one volume to the Reformation, devotes another to 
what it styles the Wars of Religion. The Wars of Religion 
did not end in the seventeenth century, nor in the nineteenth. 
France is still sore from her losses by the last. 

The influences of an ecclesiastical establishment and of the 
simple religious motive were curiously intertwined in what led 
to the fall of Napoleon III. The relations of Germany to the 
papacy had an important influence in bringing on first the war 
between Austria and Prussia in 1866 and then that between 
France and Prussia in 1870, both fomented from Rome, as 
events likely to prove a check to the Protestant interest in 
Europe.^ The proclamation of the German Empire at Ver- 
sailles was the unexpected fruit — unexpected but not unnatural. 
The German fought for God and fatherland. The French were 
permeated by the godless philosophy of the first republic. 

The German is taught religion in the school. He is re- 
minded of it from the throne. The Emperor William, as fully 
as the Czar, seizes every opportunity to claim a divine sanction 

' See Autobiography of Andrew D. White, II. 350. 

XXXIV [ 19 ] 



THE rOWER OF RELIGION 

for his authority.^ HcJm,s thrust France aside as the universal 
protector of CathoHc nii^ions in the East, and found his profit 
in it by large territorial acquisitions in China, seized in retalia- 
tion for outrages on German missionaries. He has made his 
pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 

France, too, of late, in the same way, has so shaped her 
Chinese policy that the flag has followed the missionary. The 
republic has clung to the ecclesiastical prerogatives of the 
monarchy, though with the abrogation of the Concordat it is 
difficult to see how its protectorate over Eastern missions can 
hereafter be asserted. 

A religious motive in foreign affairs can only l^e seriously ad- 
vanced when a religious motive is recognized in home affairs. 
The loss of that in the French Revolution was one of the first 
things of the consequence of which, after the restoration, Talley- 
rand warned Louis XVIII. when consulting with him over the 
best assurances with which to surround his throne. You have, 
said he, to deal with a people "accustomed to found their 
rights on their pretensions, and their pretensions on their 
power." " Formerly, religious influence could support royal au- 
thority ; it can do so no longer, now that religious indifference 
has pervaded all classes, and become almost universal." "Roy- 
al authority can therefore only derive support from public 
opinion; and to obtain this it must be in accord with that 
opinion." ^ 

It may be doubted whether religious indifference was so 
widespread in the France of 1815, when this was written. If 
so, it was because of a torrent of revolution which for the time 
had swept before it the good and the bad alike. That torrent 
has left to public opinion a lasting place of power over human 
governments, but it has also, I believe, left religion in its old 
place as the main foundation of public opinion. 

Early in 1905 the Emperor of Germany, in a public address,^ 

* See particularly his speech at Coblentz, August 31, 1897, quoted 
in Reinsch, World Politics, p. 301. 

2 Memoirs of Talleyrand, Putnam's edition, III. 130, 147. 

*On March 9, 1905, in an address before the naval recruits at 
Wilhelmshaven. 

XXXIV [ 20 ] 



X 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

declared that the defeats of Russia in her war with Japan were 
due to the deplorable condition of Russian Christianity. It 
was deplorable because directed by a state church which failed 
to respond to the spirit of the times. None of its members 
could abandon it for another without forfeiting all civil rights, 
including that of holding property. Its principal functionary, 
M. Pobedonostseff, was a conservative of the conservatives, to 
whom the Orthodox Greek Church seemed the only thing that 
bound the many peoples of Russia into the Russian people.^ 
The creed of this church is mediaeval : of its teachings and in- 
fluence Tolstoi has told, and the world believes him. 

The very month after the sharp words of the German 
Emperor, the Czar, against the protest of Pobedonostseff, de>. 
creed religious liberty; and his subsequent convocation of th^ 
Douma was closely followed by directions to the Metropolitan 
who is president of the Holy Synod to call a general council of 
the Orthodox Greek Church. No such council had met since 
1654. It can hardly fail to give a new direction to the religious 
life of the mass of the Russian people.^ Already they have 
shown a new interest in what it stands for, by a general inquiry 
for copies of the Bible. More parts of Bibles and Testaments 
were sold in Russia last year than in any year before, over 
half a million in European Russia alone. The fruits have not 
thus far made for peace, but they may be worth more than peace. 

A department of the Holy Synod until recently, as a bureau 
of "Spiritual Censure," held control of all publications on 
ecclesiastical' history, theology, or philosophy. Nothing could 
be published or sold on these topics without its permission. 
It is worth noting that from 1863 this bureau forbade the cir- 
culation of any part of the Old Testament, except the Psalms, 
in the languages of the people. There was too much in the 
other books that breathed the spirit of revolution. 

' Autobiography of Andrew D. White, II. chap. 36. 
Before these changes, Pobedonostseff and his school had relied 
on the popular reverence for religion as the main support of autocracy. 
If there be such a thing as a religious stage of development for nations, 
Russia was still in it. The events of 1906 would indicate that reverence, 
for her state church at least, had been seriously weakened. 
XXXIV [ 21 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

It may indeed be ^My said that no single cause for the 
spread of religious liberty and, by consequence, of civil liberty 
in modern times has been so powerful as the circulation of the 
Bible in all languages. It is to-day pronounced by publishers 
to be the best-selling book in the world.* The market for it 
has steadily broadened with and because of the new lati- 
tude of interpretation and criticism countenanced by modern 
churches. 

The last sixty or seventy years has indeed given to Christen- 
dom a new Bible. It is not that so very much has been dis- 
covered by archaeologists or worked out by critical research, 
which was unknown before, but because the attitude of Chris- 
tian people and Christian ministers toward biblical study has 
become gradually revolutionized. Textual homilctics, textual 
theology, unscientific theories of interpretation, have become 
generally discredited. The spirit of free inquiry, which not 
long ago characterized but a few men like Strauss and Renan, 
has now begun to characterize all real Christian scholarship in 
the United States and most of it in the world at large. Here, 
from the absence of religious establishments and the presence 
of universal education at public charge, it has naturally had 
free scope. It has given a prominence before unknown in 
modern times, outside of China, to character and conduct as the 
foundations of a true life. It has brought the general Christian 
world to look upon them as about the only evidence worth hav- 
ing that in any man earth has been brought close to heaven, 
while still maintaining that character and conduct are the fruits 
of the ideal, the children of faith in the invisible and eternal. It 
has brought the wider world of civilized mankind in all conti- 
nents to care little for a man's theological beliefs, everything for 
his beliefs, his real beliefs, as to what is the true, the good, and 
the beautiful. 

Panislamism has gained a fresh inspiration from this source. 

* The North India Bible Society, which is sixty years old, published 
and circulated, between 1890 and 1900, a yearly average of 87,000 
copies of Bibles, New Testaments, and selected portions of them. 
Since 1900 this annual output has been nearly doubled, and the number 
rose in 1905 to 195,879. 

XXXIV [ 22 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

The Young Turkish Party, already recognized as an important 
political force, founds itself on treating the Koran with the same 
free hand with which Christians treat the Bible, and so bringing 
its teachings into harmony with the new thought of a new 
time. 

During the last few years the American people have in- 
sisted, to a marked degree, on the observance of higher ethical 
standards on the part of their public and of their business men. 
The movement in this direction has been a steady one for 
more than half a century. In 1843 the foremost English 
novelist, fresh from a visit to the United States, could speak of 
it as "that Republic, but yesterday let loose upon her noble 
course, and but to-day so maimed and lamfe, so full of sores and 
ulcers, foul to the eye and almost hopeless to the sense, that 
her best friends turn from the loathsome creature with dis- 
gust."* So severe an arraignment was unjustified in 1843. 
It would have been impossible and unthinkable at any time since, 
let us say, the Civil War. But it was not the Civil War that 
elevated the moral standards of the people. War is a salvation 
to some souls, a damnation to many more. "Treasons, strata- 
gems, and spoils" — the spoils of the field and the spoils of the 
army contractor — make a poor soil for the growth of public 
morals. The American people have grown to a purer life, or at 
least to a demand for a purer life on the part of those who lead 
their fortunes, mainly by force of a world movement, which 
has simply found here the freest play. 

The better relations between Jew and Christian that now 
generally exist are attributable, in no small degree, to the 
growth of this ethical spirit; not so much because ethics make 
for fraternity, as that this growth proceeds from a tendency 
on the part of Christians toward acceptance of the same 
fundamental religious principles. The Jew has never troubled 
himself very much with the question of personal immortality, 
and all that goes with it of responsibility and retribution. His 
aim has been to make the best of earth ; his hope that 9f a Mes- 
sianic era here. Christian theology has looked more to a future 

' Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, chap. xxii. 
XXXIV [ 23 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

world as the real home oypien, in an abode or state that, happy 
or miserable, was to endure forever. 

Christendom, during the last few years, has been approach- 
ing the Judaic view, as best expressive of the immediate ob- 
jects to be pursued in human life. Hence among those peoples 
which have gone farthest in this direction, the political and 
social condition of the Jews is more favorable than among 
those — like Russia, Roumania, and Austria— which have made 
no substantial change of position. If his life on this earth be 
the great thing for a man to regulate and plan for, why complain 
if the Jew wins the prizes of trade and wealth, though it be by 
concentrating his attention on material gains? "Go thou and 
do likewise" is becoming, perhaps too fast and with too little 
qualification, the general motto of the business world. 

Christian theology anticipated evolution in endeavoring 
to account for what is base in human nature. It set it to the 
account of original sin. To raise up a being infected with 
that not simply from his birth, but through an inheritance from 
ancestors infected with it for countless generations, was a task 
which God only could accomplish. To Him it was the work 
of a moment ; and they called it salvation. 

It was a theory well calculated to have a profound effect on 
the human mind. It gave an immense power to a priesthood 
believed to have the power of speaking for God and declaring 
to any man that his salvation had been accomplished. It put 
them by the side of kings and above kings. 

A time has come when the leaders of the church are begin- 
ning to say with John Fiske that "original sin is neither more 
nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with 
him, and the process of evolution is an advance toward true 
salvation," 

The church is changing — has changed — its ground. It 
is not losing — has not lost — its power. It makes use of the old 
truth in a new way. It was right at bottom. 

The unfolding of the law of evolution from the first, for 
those who accepted it, unquestionably tended to narrow the 
order of things in which man has his being. As the bond be 
XXXIV [ 24 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

tween him and the lowest forms of Hfe became visibly stronger, 
that between him and any form of life higher than himself be- 
came visibly weaker. He was of less importance in the world. 
Wallace could open the gates to the new vision of the past; 
he could not shut them. He could not lead men to any new 
standpoint from which they could look on the earth as the cen- 
tre of the intellectual or moral universe. 

The church, at first, everywhere disinclined — still much of it 
disinclined — to accept the theory of evolution with all that it im- 
plies, has begun to readjust itself to its new environment. If, 
she says, this new evolution can produce from some single 
torpid cell a being with the intellectual and moral force of man, 
why may not man contain the torpid cell out of which in some 
at least may be evolving and ultimately, in some other stage of 
being, may be evolved what for want of a better word we call 
a Spirit — something with an energy akin to what we name 
divine? Force is persistent. That it is we know. What it 
is we do not know. If persistent in what is material, why not 
persistent in what is immaterial? If persistent in what we call 
time and space, why not persistent in something which we do 
not dare to call time or space and vaguely name eternity ? 

But questions like these do not much concern the mass of 
humankind. The leaders of intellectual life are few. They are 
followed at a long interval. They know this well. It is their 
office, in every generation, to set the goal, but to moderate rather 
than to speed the pace of the people as they turn in the new 
direction. 

The leaders of intellectual life who are in positions of ecclesi- 
astical authority, under the influence of these forces, have every- 
where begun to preach a new theology. It is a theology of the 
present. It might almost be called a theology of the earth, 
earthy. Its foundation is still the existence of a great first 
cause, which men call God. Its aim is still to set forth the whole 
duty of man, and to found it on his duty toward this almighty 
and eternal source of his being. But it sets forth with less as- 
sumption of a knowledge of the unseen. No Nicene creed, no 
creed professing to define the genesis and nature and attributes 
of God, could ever be the product of the twentieth century. 
XXXIV [ 25 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

The modern pulpit and 0tr\d\ are content to say with St. Paul 
that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world 
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, 
even his eternal power and Godhead." The churches of every 
faith, in some degree — of all in proportion to their share in the 
time-spirit of their generation — are pointing to Man as the 
only real revelation of the nature of God, and to the opportuni- 
ties of the present life as what chiefly concerns him, in his 
highest as well as his lowest desires and activities. One hears 
little in churches led by an educated clergy of a future heaven, 
and less of a future hell. It is this pressing, immediate world 
about us, that is their theme. "One world at a time" is more 
and more becoming the practical doctrine of the modern pulpit. 
Do your duty to-day, and be not anxious about to-morrow, 
whether it be the morrow of the next sunrise or of a million ages. 

What has been, what is to be, the effect of this change in the 
attitude of the church on the course of human history ? It will 
not remove the power of theistic appeal. If it should spread 
over all nations, and all faiths, it will leave unimpaired the mo- 
tives of duty to God and country. A war to maintain the honor 
of fatherland and of the fathers from whom it was inherited 
will always enlist the sympathies of the people with double 
force, if they are quickened by rchgious convictions. 

Recent events have shown that soldiers who believe they are 
fighting God's battles may yield before those not superior in 
numbers or arms who believe that in fighting they are honoring 
the first ancestors of the sovereign, whose spirit in an ancestor 
world holds sway over those of their own ancestors. The 
double character of the Mikado of Japan as spiritual leader 
and earthly sovereign, impressed by the institution of ancestor 
worship upon every Japanese from infancy, moves him far 
more deeply than the Russian muzhik is affected by his reverence 
for the Czar as head of his country's church. Admiral Togo's 
message to the Mikado last year, attributing to his superhuman 
influence the annihilation of the Russian fleet, spoke the real 
conviction of a great man and a great people. 

We must never forget that not only were the founders of all 
the great religions of Asiatic origin, but that religion is now a 
XXXIV [ 26 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

more vital force in Asia than on any other continent. The deep, 
if dreamy, spiritual insight, the brooding intellectual habit, the 
strength of antecedents, that belong to the East, put religion 
there in a position as lofty as it is unique. 

Hegel observed that there are two natural steps in human 
life, that of subjectivity and objectivity. The youth bends his 
thoughts toward the correspondence that he is to establish 
between himself and the universe. He proceeds from himself 
outward. He joins his life to the ideal, in hope and faith. Years 
pass and he has found his place. There is a round of daily 
duties and perhaps of pleasures, on which his attention centres. 
His thoughts now turn not to the ideal but to what Ufe in fact 
has brought him, and to how that shall be best accomplished. 

The race of man pursues the same stages. In the East they 
are still in the first. P^^ven in Japan, so largely occidentalized, 
they are constructing for themselves a new ideal of Christianity. 
Except for Japan, they are what they were. Subjectivity still 
holds them captive. 

China has recently abolished the requirement of famiharity 
with the Confucian classics on the part of those desiring official 
appointment or promotion. The first examination under the 
new system took place this fall, and the nine receiving the high- 
est marks were men educated in the United States or Europe — 
the first of them a doctor of philosophy and the next a doctor 
of civil law of an American university. 

A change like this involves, as a necessary consequence, the 
rise of new national ideals. The calm and restful tone of the 
Confucian philosophy of life will be replaced by something less 
smooth and more deep, more religious. The spirit of the West 
has burst upon the silent sea of self-satisfied seclusion on which 
China has been idly floating for two thousand years. It has 
troubled the waters. It may turn them into a river that will 
run far. 

As respects Mahometanism, the fundamental precepts 
of that faith are such as necessarily to give them a strong 
political effect.* Its adherents stand together, like the members 

1 Only by force of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 has religious tolera- 
tion been anything but an empty word at Constantinople. 

XXXIV [ 27 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

of a secret order, Ir^Piirope they cling to their religion as 
closely as in Asia. In 1900 seven thousand Mahometan Ser- 
vians suddenly left the country, because one Mahometan had 
been received into a Christian church.* 

The strongest assurance of the power of the Sublime Porte 
is the general recognition by the Mahometan vv^orld, and the 
King of Great Britain as Emperor of India, of the Sultan of 
Turkey as the true CaHph or Commander of the Faithful. 
The strongest menace of the British Empire in the East is the 
utter f orcignness there of Western Christianity. The European 
sent to Asia or Africa to govern a subject race finds himself 
separated from it by an aloofness which he cannot conquer. 
It does not proceed from him. He is often anxious to overcome 
it in the native. But it is the inevitable fruit of antipathetic 
relations, springing from religious differences. 

The religions of the West rule the religionist. The religion 
of Islam rules every Mahometan, be he saint or sinner; 
and in case of war all are faithful to the commander of the 
faithful. Lord Cromer, a few months ago, received a warning 
letter from one professing to write in the name of his people of 
Egypt, and whose stately periods remind one of the Hebrew 
prophets. It was addressed to "the Reformer of Egypt." 

"He must be blind [said the writer], who sees not what the 
English have wrought in Egypt: the gates of justice stand 
open to the poor ; the streams flow through the land and are not 
stopped at the order of the strong; the poor man is lifted up 
and the rich man pulled down; the hand of the oppressor and 
the briber is struck when outstretched to do evil. Our eyes see 
these things and we know from whom they come. You will 
say, 'Be thankful, O, men of Egypt! and bless those who 
benefit you ' ; and very many of us — those who preserve a free 
mind and are not ruled by flattery and guile — are thankful. 
But thanks lie on the surface of the heart, and beneath is a 
deep well. 

" While peace is in the land the spirit of Islam sleeps. We 

* Francis H. E. Palmer, Austro-Hungarian Life (New York, 1903), 
p. 88. 

XXXIV [ 28 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

hear the imam cry out in the mosque against the unbelievers, 
but his words pass by Uke wind and are lost. Children hear 
them for the first time and do not understand them; old men 
have heard them from childhood and pay no heed. 

"But it is said, 'There is war between England and Abdul- 
Hamid Khan.' If that be so, a change must come. The 
words of the imam arc echoed in every heart, and every Moslem 
hears only the cry of the faith. As men we do not love the sons 
of Osman; the children at the breast know their words, and 
that they have trodden down the Egyptians like dry reeds. 
But as Moslems they are our brethren; the Khalif holds the 
sacred places and the noble relics. Though the Khalif were 
hapless as Bajazid, cruel as Murad, or mad as Ibrahim, he is the 
shadow of God, and every Moslem must leap up at his call as 
the willing servant to his master, though the wolf may devour 
his child while he does his master's work. The call of the 
Sultan is the call of the faith ; it carries with it the command of 
the Prophet, blessings, etc. I and many more trust that all 
may yet be peace; but if it be war, be sure that he who has 
a sword will draw it, he who has a club will strike with it. 
The women will cry from the housetops, ' God give victory to 
Islam ! ' 

" You will say : ' The Egyptian is more ungrateful than a dog, 
which remembers the hand which fed him. He is foolish as 
the madman who pulls down the rooftree of his house upon 
himself.' It may be so to worldly eyes, but in the time of 
danger to Islam the Moslem turns away from the things of 
this world and thirsts only for the service of his faith, even 
though he looks in the face of death. May God (His name be 
glorified) avert the evil." 

It is the existence of this spirit which makes the punish- 
ments often inflicted on insurgents by the British in their 
Eastern possessions sharp up to the point of barbarism. Noth- 
ing less tells there. 

It is the mosque that guards the palace of the Sultan. 

Sir William Marriott, when in company with Ismail 
Pasha, the first Khedive of Egypt, happened to meet in Bou- 
XXXIV [ 29 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

logne a procession of J^ng girls on their way to their first 
communion. The Pasha saluted it with a low reverence. 
"Your Highness is more Catholic than the Catholics," said 
Sir William. "Ah," was the reply, "you see I have ruled, and 
no man can rule without religion."* 

On this point East and West can both agree. Napoleon said 
in reference to the Concordat of 1801, that he saw in the church 
not the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of social 
order. Later, at the height of his power, speaking in the same 
vein, he intimated his belief that Christianity was an illusion, 
but a very useful one. It assured the tranquillity of the state in 
reconciling man with himself and giving him a philosophy 
to live by. The age of illusions was for nations, as for individ- 
uals, the age of happiness.^ 

It is not for history to pronounce whether any religion or 
all religions be founded on mere illusions. She must leave 
that to theologians and psychologists. But in her field of in- 
ductive sociology, she owns still the continuing force of the 
religious motive. 

In modern politics it takes on a new importance. They 
are expressed in terms of representative government. It may 
be representation by a legislature or by a ministry. In either 
case it will assume to represent the people by representing a 
party. Representative government implies and involves party 
organization. Party organization is unfavorable to the ex- 
pression of candid, impartial public opinion. But let any 
religious question be involved, and public opinion will find a 
way to express itself, which no party machinery can seriously 
obstruct. 

So in world politics, now so largely governed by a public 
opinion of the world, the pressure that can be brought upon any 
one power by others — that is brought upon each by other 
peoples through the press — will be immensely strengthened if it 
be impelled by an ethical or religious motive; ethical or relig- 
ious, for an ethical impulse common to many nations belongs 
to the religion of humanity. 

* Memoirs of Grant Duff, II. 18. 

2 Memoirs of Talleyrand, Putnam's edition, I. 339. 

XXXIV [ 30 ] 



THE POWER OF RELIGION 

That grows as ecclesiasticism declines. The Christian 
church has been gradually reduced, to use the phrase of Gardi- 
ner, "from the exercise of power to the employment of in- 
fluence." Its tendencies of thought run, more than those 
fostered by any other of the great religions, toward loyalty 
to humanity, rather than to race. It is the only one that makes 
any serious effort to preach its gospel "to every creature." 
"We recognize," said Tertullian, "one commonwealth, the 
world." It does not hesitate to put its own rules above those 
assumed for political science or economy. From the churches 
of England came the last great impulse that carried through the 
Corn Laws, and made free trade her policy to-day. There arc 
signs of a movement in the churches of the United States in the 
same direction. Should it gather force, statesmen must reckon 
seriously with it. 

Renan, in his "Life of Jesus,"* remarks that he was the first 
of men to conceive, or at all events to put Hfe into that thought, 
that Hberty was something independent of politics; that one's 
country is not everything; and that the man is anterior and 
superior to the citizen. 

The share of government in human society becomes less ob- 
trusive as time goes on. Show of force declines as the senti- 
ment of obedience to law becomes more prevalent. Public 
authority is more and more localized in small political com- 
munities, there to be administered by representatives of the 
inhabitants. These social principles go to diminish the weight 
of national governments, and make the individual man feel 
that he is a citizen first of his own local community and then of 
the world. They also strongly reinforce the general trend of 
the Christian religion (which we may fairly say is to-day the 
strongest of any in its influence upon human history) toward 
insistence on universal brotherhood as the ultimate criterion 
of international obligations. 

' Chapter vii. 



XXXIV [ 31 ] 



XXXV 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILI- 
ZATION 

"SOCIAL CULTURE IN EDUCATION AND 

RELIGION" 

BY 

IWILLIAM T. HARRIS. L.LD. 

FORMER UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION 



/fCCEPTING on the high authority oj Professor Baldwin 
the vast im parlance oj the influence oj religion upon modern 
life, the obverse oj that same question, the meaning oj religion, 
its outlook, its historical development, becomes equally impor- 
tant. It is this problern oj the growth oj religious thought, its 
educational influence upon man and upon his educational in- 
stitutions, which is here taken up by Mr. William T. Harris, 
jor many years, and until his recent retirement, the United States 
Commissioner oj Education. This address was first delivered 
by Mr. Harris be jor e the International Congress oj Arts and 
Sciences at the St. Louis exhibition. It has since appeared in 
the Educational Review, and is here published under Mr. Harrises 
revision. 

I SHALL announce as my thesis that: Social Culture is the 
training of the individual for social institutions. 

Man by his social institutions secures the adjustment of the 
individual to the social whole — the social unit. The person, 
or individual, comes into such harmony and co-operation with 
human society as a whole that he may receive a share of all 
the production of his fellow-men; be protected against violence 
by their united strength; given the privilege of accumulating 

XXXV [ I ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

property and of enjoyin|^ in peace and security, in such a 
manner as to escape from sudden approaches of famine and 
penury by reason of seasonal extremes or by reason of the 
vicissitudes of infancy, old age, disease, or of the perturbations 
affecting the community. And finally, there is participation 
in the wisdom of the race — the opportunity of sharing in the 
knowledge that comes from the scientific inventory of nature in 
all its kingdoms, and of human life on the globe in all its va- 
ried experiments, successful and unsuccessful; the opportunity 
of gaining an insight into the higher results of science in the 
field of discovery of laws and principles — the permanent forms 
of existence under the variable conditions of time and place. 
Finally, we may share, through our membership in the social 
unity, in the moral insights that have resulted from the discipline 
of pain, the defeats and discomfitures arising from the choice 
of mistaken careers on the part of individuals and entire com- 
munities. The sin and error of men have vicariously helped 
the race by great object lessons which have taught mankind 
through all the ages, and now teach the present generation of 
men — all the more efl^ectively because of the devices of our 
civilization which not only make the records of the past ac- 
cessible to each and every individual, but institute a present 
means of intercommunication by and through which each 
people — each individual — may see from day to day the unfold- 
ing of the drama of human history. 

The good of this unity of the individual with the social 
whole by means of institutions may be summed up by saying 
that it re-enforces the individual by the labor of all, the thought 
of all, and the good fortune of all. It takes from him only 
his trifling contribution from his trade or vocation, and gives 
in return a share in the gigantic aggregate of productions of 
all mankind. It receives from him the experience of his little 
life and gives him in return the experience of the race, a myriad 
of myriads strong, and working through millenniums. 

What Thomas Hobbes said of the blessings of the political 
whole, the State, is true when applied to civilization as an inter- 
national combination of States. 

" Outside of the State," said he, " is found only the dominion 

XXXV [ 2 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

of the passions — war, fear, poverty, filth, isolation, barbarism, 
ignorance, and savagery ; while in the State is found the domin- 
ion of reason — peace, security, riches, ornament, sociability, 
elegance, science, and good -will." 

With this point of view we see at a glance the potency of 
the arts of social culture, fitting as they do the individual for 
a co-operative Hfe with his fellow-men in the institutions of 
civilization. 

My thesis proceeds from this insight to lay down the doctrine 
that the first social culture is religion and that religion is the 
foundation of social life in so far as that social life belongs to 
the history of civilization. Religion in the first place is not 
merely the process of an individual mind, but it is a great social 
process of intellect and will and heart. Its ideas are not the 
unaided thoughts of individual scholars, but the aggregate re- 
sults of a social activity of intellect, so to speak; each thought 
of the individual being modified by the thought of his com- 
munity so that it comes to the individual with the substantial 
impress of authority. 

There is a religious social process, the most serious of all 
social activity. In it the religious view of the world is shaped 
and delivered to the individual by authority such as cannot be 
resisted by him except with martyrdom. Each modification 
in the body of religious doctrine has come through individual 
innovation, but at the expense of disaster to his Hfe. He had 
to sacrifice his hfe so far as his ordinary prosperity was con- 
cerned, and his doctrine had to be taken up by his fellow-men 
acting as a social whole, and translated into their mode of view- 
ing divine revelation before it effected a modification in the popu- 
lar faith. It was a process of social assimilation of the product 
of the individual comparable to the physiologic process by 
which the organs of the body take up a portion of food and 
convert it into a blood corpuscle before adding it to the bodily 
structure. 

So in the living church of a people goes on forever the great 
process of receiving new views from its members, and its mem- 
bers include not only the Saint Bernards, but also the Voltaires. 
XXXV [ 3 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

The Church receives ib0ticw views, but does not by any means 
adopt them until it has submitted them to the negative process 
of criticism and elimination, and finally to the transforming 
process that selects the available portions for assimilation and 
nutriment. This is certainly the slow^est and most conservative 
spiritual process that goes on in civilization. But it is by all 
means the most salutary. The individuals that suggest the 
most radical modifications arc swiftly set aside, and their result 
is scarcely visible in the body of faith transmitted to the next 
generation. 

It is clear this conservatism is necessary. Any new modi- 
fication of doctrine gets adopted only by the readjustment of 
individuals within the communion or church. All the inertia 
of the institution is against it. Again, it is not only necessary 
but desirable, because it is a purification process, the trans- 
mutation of what is individual and tainted with idiosyncrasy, 
into what is universal and well adapted for all members within 
the communion. The Church must prove all things and hold 
fast to that which can stand the test. The test is furnished 
by what is old, by what is already firmly fixed in the body of 
rehgious faith. If its foundations could be uprooted so that 
religion gave up the body of its faith, all authority would go 
at once to the ground, and with it the relation of the institu- 
tional whole to the individuals within it. Such an event can 
scarcely be conceived in a realizing sense, but a study of the 
Reign of Terror in the French Revolution aids one to gain a 
point of view. When a citizen finds himself in a social whole 
in which all the principles that have governed the community 
have become shaky, he gets to be unable to count on any par- 
ticular set of social reactions in his neighbors from day to 
day, or to calculate what motives they may entertain in their 
minds in the presence of any practical situation. He is forced 
into an attitude of universal suspicion of the intentions of his 
fellow-men, and he is in his turn a general object of suspicion 
himself. The solution forced on the community is the adoption, 
by the Committee of Safety, of death for all suspected ones. 
But the more deaths the more suspicion. For the relatives 
of the slain — those who yesterday were with us, but who en- 
XXXV [ 4 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

deavored to dissuade us from guillotining their parents, brothers, 
or cousins — as to those we are warranted in suspecting that they 
to-day are planning a new revolution and to-morrow may put 
us to death. 

We may by this, after a sort, realize the situation when the 
foundations of rehgious belief are utterly broken up. 

Fortunately for us our civilization carries with it, even un- 
der varying creeds, sects, and denominations, the great body 
of religious belief uncj^uestioned. Only the Nihilists offer a 
radical denial to this body of Christian doctrine, and we can 
see how easily we might come to a Reign of Terror if it were 
possible to spread this Nihilistic doctrine widely among any 
considerable class of our people. For the Nihilistic view would 
extend its death remedy, after the destruction of its enemies, 
to its own ranks, and guillotine its own Robespierres by rea- 
son of suspicion and distrust entertained toward one's accom- 
pHces. 

The substantiality of the view of religion is the basis of 
civilization. It holds conservatively to elementary notions of 
an affirmative character such as the monogamic marriage, 
the protection of helpless infancy in certain fundamental rights, 
the protection of women; the care for the aged and the weak- 
lings of society; private ownership of property, including under 
property land and franchises as well as movable chattels. 
The Church includes in its fundamentals the security of life 
against violence, and makes murder the most heinous of crimes. 
It insists on respect for established law and for the magistrates 
themselves. It even goes so far as to protect the heretic and 
to insure the private right of the individual to dissent from the 
established or prevalent religious creeds so far as church 
worship or dogmas of theology are concerned. It is obvious 
that the community as a social whole would be obliged to limit 
its toleration of private creeds were there a great extension of 
Nihilism possible or were there to arise sects that attacked the 
sacredness of the family institution — by polygamy, for example, 
or by the abohtion of marriage; or sects that attacked civil 
society by attempting practically to abolish the ownership of 
property (Proudhon said, "All property is robbery"); or by 
XXXV [ 5 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

the denial of the right^ laborers to contract with employers 
for their labor. 

When we study these fundamental ideas common to the 
different confessions of our composite church, we see at once 
how powerful is the established doctrine of the prevailing 
religious ideal in our civilization in exerting an authoritative 
control over individuals as to belief and practice. 

Many people have come to believe, in this age of greatly 
extended religious toleration, that the Church as an institu- 
tion is moribund, and that its authority is about to disappear 
wholly from the earth in an age of science, of the ballot box, 
and of universal secular education at public expense. It 
would seem to them that public opinion is sufficient or about 
to become sufficient, by means of the newspaper and the book, 
to secure life, personal liberty, and the peaceful pursuit of 
happiness, without the necessity for a religious provision for 
social culture. Only the culture that comes from the secular 
school is adjudged to be necessary for all. 

For the proper consideration of this question it is necessary 
to take up more fundamentally the origin and real function 
of religion. We shall find two fundamental views of nature 
and man the foundation of two opposite religious movements 
in the world history — the Christian and the Oriental. Accord- 
ing to one of these views our free secular life, our science and 
the arts, our literature and our productive industry and our 
commerce, are utterly perverse and not to be tolerated on any 
terms. 

A year ago or more there was published a letter written by 
an Arab Sheik of Bagdad to the editor of a Paris newspaper 
{La Revue for March, 1902), in which he expressed admira- 
tion for certain external characteristics of European civiliza- 
tion, but found no words bitter enough for his detestation of 
the Christian religion professed by all European nations. To 
him it was all a horrible blasphemy. The pure One as preached 
in the Koran is sovereign and transcendent, and to speak of it 
as divine-human, or as triune in the Christian sense, is to the 
Mahometan , an act of unspeakable sacrilege. Therefore 
XXXV [ 6 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

if oui- triiimplis in science and art flow from our religion the 
worshipper of Islam must regard them as his mortal foe/ And 
yet the Arab Sheik is much nearer to the Christian view than 
is the Buddhist or the Brahmin. The East Indian view holds 
a first principle that repudiates or shuts out from its attributes 
consciousness and will and feeling — all the elements of per- 
sonality. But the Allah of the Koran is personal and in an 

^ Lc Dernier Mot de VI slant d I'Europe. Par le Sheikh Abdul 
Hagk de Bagdad; Paris, La Revue No. 5 (ist March, 1902). Passage 
translated from the beginning: 

"Christian Peoples: The hatred of Islam against Europe is 
implacable. After ages of effort to effect a reconciliation between 
us, the only result to-day is that we detest you more than ever. This 
civilization of yours and its marvels of progress which have rendered 
you so rich and so powerful, be it known to you that we hate them 
and we spurn them with our very souls . . . the Mohammedan 
religion is to-day in open hostility against your world of progress. . . . 
We explain how it is that we spurn with horror not only your religious 
doctrines but all your science, all your arts, and everything that 
comes from Christian Europe ... I the humble Sheik Abdul Hagk, 
member of the holy Panislamistic league, come with a special mission 
to explain clearly how this comes to be. . . . Our creed is this: 
There is in the universe one sole being, God, source of all power, of 
all light, of all truth, of all justice, and of all goodness; He has not 
been generated; He has not generated any one. He is single, in- 
finite, eternal; Alone, He wished to be known; He made the universe. 
He created man. He surrounded man with the splendors of crea- 
tion and imposed on him the sacred duty of worshipping Him alone. 
To worship continually this only God is man's only mission on earth. 
Man's soul is immortal; his life on earth only a probation . . . the 
supreme duty of man to worship the only God and to sacrifice himself 
to Him without reserve; the sum of all iniquity to renounce the 
only God and to worship a false God . . . for us Mussulmans there 
is a world containing only two kinds of human beings, believers and 
infidels (mecreants) ; love, charity, brotherhood to the believers; 
contempt, disgust, hatred, and war for the infidels. Among the 
infidels the most hated and the most criminal are those who worship 
God but ascribe to Him earthly parents, or fatherhood, or a human 
mother. Such monstrous blindness seems to us to surpass all measure 
of iniquity: the presence among us of infidels of this kind is the 
plague of our life; their doctrine is a direct menace to the purity 
of our faith; contact with them is defilement, and any relation with 
them whatever a torment to our souls. '- 

XXXV [ 7 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

important sense ethical, Jiaving the attributes of righteousness 
and goodness borrowed ffom the Old Testament by the Hanyf 
preachers of the Ebionitic sect of Old Testament Christians 
who proselyted Mahomet, as shown by Sprenger.* But 
Brahma is above the ethical distinctions of good and evil, and 
goodness and righteousness are as naught to him and to the 
Yogi who seeks by mortification to get rid of his selfhood. 

Let us endeavor to find, by the well-known road taken by 
the philosophy of history, the twofold root of all human ex- 
perience which gives rise to the religious insights which in 
their first form of external authority govern human life before 
the advent of the stage of reflection and individual free thought 
— religion before secular education. 



Examine life and human experience as we may, we find 
our attention drawn to two aspects or opposite poles, so to speak, 
of each object presented to us. 

The first aspect includes all that is directly perceivable by 
the five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This is 
the aspect of immediate existence. 

But experience begins at once to go beyond the immediate 
aspect and to find that it is a product or effect of outlying 
causes. We are not satisfied with it as an immediate exist- 
ence; it now comes to be for us an effect or mediated existence. 

If we call the first aspect an effect, we shall call this second 
aspect a causal process. 

Each immediate object, whether it be thing or event, is an 
effect, and beyond it we seek the causes that explain it. The 
first pole of existence is therefore immediate existence, and 
the second is the causal chain in which the object, whether 
it be considered as thing or as event, is found. 

Since the causal process contains the explanation of im- 
mediate existence, the knowledge which is of most importance 
is that knowledge which includes the completest chain of causa- 
tion. It is the knowledge of primal cause which contains the 

^ Das Lcbcn und die Lchrc des Mohammed; Berlin 1869. Chapter 
I., pp. 16-27, 37-47. 60, 69, 70-77, 101-107. 

XXXV i 8 J 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

fulness of explanation. And the mind of the human race 
has devoted itself chiefly to the question of first cause. 

In this search, as already suggested, it has been the mind of 
the social whole of a people that has done the thinking, rather 
than the minds of mere individuals. Even the most enlight- 
ened individuals and the most original and capable ones have 
borrowed the main body of their ideas from the religious 
tradition of their people, and their success in effecting modi- 
fications and new features in the existing creed has been due to 
the co-operation of like-minded contemporaries which assisted 
the utterance of the new idea so far as to make it prevail. 
Again, the collisions of peoples settled by war and conquest 
have brought about new syntheses of religious doctrine which 
have resulted in deeper religious insight and more consistent 
views of the divine nature. 

It has been the long-continued process of pondering on the 
second aspect of things and events, the second pole of ex- 
perience, that has reached the religious dogmas of the greater 
and greatest religions of human history — a process of social 
units in which whole peoples have merged. 

This process has been a study of the question how the per- 
fect One can be conceived as making a world of imperfect 
beings. For imperfect or derivative beings demand another 
order of being, an originating source, as a logical condition of 
existence. But this source must explain not only the efii- 
cient cause of the imperfect, but also the motive or purpose, 
the final cause or end, of the creation of the imperfect being. 

There are two great steps which religion takes after it leaves 
ancestor worship and other forms of animism, in which dis- 
embodied individuals as good or evil demons reign as personal 
causes in an order above the natural order of things and events 
which are immediately present to our senses. 

As the intellect of man became developed, socially and 
individually, the great step was taken above all secondary 
causes to a first cause transcending nature and also transcend- 
ing time and space — the logical conditions of finitude and mul- 
tiplicity. 

The transcendent unity, in which all things and events los^ 
XXXV [ 9 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

their individual being and mingled in one chaotic confusion, 
is conceived as a great ^id into which all things and events 
are resolved when traced to their first principle. 

Transcendence was in the first stage of religious con- 
templation the important attribute to be kept in mind when 
thinking of the First Cause. 

To halt in this thought of mere transcendence of the world 
meant pantheism in the sense that the One is conceived to 
possess all being and to be devoid of finitude. It exists apart 
in an order above all fmitude, as found in our experience. To 
deny all relation to finitude comes as a result from this ab- 
stract thought of the infinite. It is the nothing of the world 
of experience and is to be thought of as its dissolution. The 
philosophy of Kapila in the Sankhya Karika, the religion of 
both the Yoga doctrines, the Yoga of complete asceticism (of 
Patanjali) as well as the Karma Yoga expounded in the Bha- 
gavad Gita, reach a One not only above things and events 
and above a world order, but also elevated even above creator- 
ship — and above intellect and will — a pure being that is as 
empty as it is pure, having no distinctions within itself nor 
for others— light and darkness, the widest distinction in nature, 
are all the same to Brahma, and so also are good and evil, 
sin and virtue, "shame and fame," as Emerson names these 
ethical distinctions in his poem of Brahma — they are all one 
to Brahma. 

When the social mind had reached this insight of the tran- 
scendence of the Great First Cause we see that it lost the world 
of things and events and had annulled one of the two poles 
of experience which it was attempting to explain. And it had 
left in its thought only a great negative abstraction, pure being 
or pure naught, with no positive distinctions, not even con- 
sciousness, nor the moral idea of ethics, goodness and right- 
eousness or mercy and justice. It was obliged to deny the 
creation altogether and conceive the world as a vast dream, 
a maya. 

Asia's chief thought is this idea of transcendence of the One 
First Cause, above the world and above creation and creative 
XXXV [ lo] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

activity. But in the Old Testament we have the last word of 
Asia; it reveals an insight which reacts against the thought of 
this abstract oneness as transcendental Being, and sets in its 
place the idea of a creator. 

God as creator makes the world, but does not lose his 
sovereignty by this act. He also retains consciousness, inward 
distinction; he is personal, having intellect and will and also 
feeling. 

The pantheistic idea which conceived God only as transcen- 
dent One, followed its thought out to the denial of all creative 
activity and even to the denial of all inward distinction of sub- 
ject and object. It ended its search for a first cause (follow- 
ing out the causal Hne which it began with) by denying causal- 
ity altogether and finding only a quiet, empty being devoid 
of finitude within itself and annihilating objective finitude 
altogether. Hence its search ended with the denial of true 
being to the world and to man. 

But this self-contradiction was corrected by the Israelitic 
people, who felt an inward necessity— a logical necessity — of 
conceiving the First Cause as active, both as intellect making 
internal distinctions of subject and object, and also as a free 
will creating a world of finite reality in which it could reveal 
itself as goodness. The essence of goodness, in the Old Testa- 
ment sense of the idea, consists in imparting true being to that 
which has it not — God creates real beings. Goodness not only 
makes others, but gives them rights ; that is to say, gives them 
claims on its consideration. 

While Orientalism with the single idea of transcendence or 
sovereignty arrived at the idea of a One without the many, and 
at a consequent destruction of what it set out to explain, Theism 
found a First Cause that could explain the world as created 
by an ethical being, a personal One that possessed what we 
call "character," namely a fixed self-determination of will — 
of which the two elements were goodness and righteousness. 
This doctrine conceived ethics as a fundamental element in the 
character of the Absolute, a primordial form of being belong- 
ing to the First Cause. 

Time and space according to the first form of religion — 
XXXV [ 1 1 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

that is to say, according; to the lirst completed thought ar- 
rived at by the social i4WHgence of the race — are illusions 
and the producer of illusions. All illusions arise in the primor- 
dial distinction of subject and object which constitutes the 
lapse into consciousness out of primeval unity which is not sub- 
ject and object/ This thought of Kapila becomes the basis of 
the religion of Buddhism, the religion founded on the simple 
idea of transcendence of the One First Cause above all causality. 
This is opposite to the religion of the Bible, which reveals the 
divine as a One that is goodness. Goodness is so gracious as 
to- create and give independent reality to nature and man — 
in short, to make man al)lc to sin and to defy the First Cause 
his Creator, Here emerges for the hrst time the idea of sin. 
]\Ian, as maya or illusion, is not created nor is he a creator of 
things or events — his deeds are only seeming, for he does not 
possess true reality himself. But with the doctrine of theism 
man has an eternal selfhood given him and is responsible for 
the acts of his will; he can sin and repent. 

He can choose the ethical and form in himself the image of 
God, or on the other hand he can resist the divine and create 
an Inferno. 

While theism commands man to renounce selfishness, pan- 
theism commands to renounce selfhood. 

Theism contains in it as a special prerogative the possibility 
of meeting difficulties insoluble to pantheism. It has solved 
the great difficulty of conceiving a first cause so transcendent 
that it is no cause of the world and man. For theism sees the 
necessity of goodness and righteousness in the first cause and 
hence finds the world and man in the divine mind. But it, too, 
sees divine sovereignty and does not lose that thought in its 
theory of man and nature. Nature is full of beings that perish, 
notwithstanding the fact that they come from a perfect Creator. 
The history of man is full of sin and rebellion against good- 
ness and righteousness. But our theistic insight knows that God 
is holy; that he possesses perfect goodness and righteousness. 
The exclusive contemplation of the imperfections of man and 

'Memorial verses of the Sankhya Karika, Nos. XXI, XXII, 
XXIV, LXII, LXIV. 

XXXV [ 12 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

even of his best works leads to the pantheistic denial of the 
world and to despair as to man's salvation before the sovereign 
first cause. The religion of theism often lapses toward Orien- 
taHsm in its condemnation of nature and history as empty 
of all good. Whenever it has gone so far that it blasphemes 
the First Cause by limiting divine goodness, the Church has 
given a check to this tendency and ushered in an epoch of 
missionary effort, wherein the true believer leaves off his ex- 
cessive practice of self-mortification and devotes himself like 
St. Francis to the work of carrying salvation to the lost. It 
goes out like St. Dominic to save the intellect and to have not 
only pious hearts but pious intellects that devote their lives to the 
study of the creation, trying to see how God works in his good- 
ness, giving true being to his creatures, and lifting them up into 
rational souls able to see the vision of God.^ 

The piety of the intellect contains in it also another possibility 
of lapse into impiety of intellect, namely through lack of power to 
hold to the sovereignty of God. It may go astray from the 
search of the first cause and set up secondary causes in place 
of a first cause. This is the opposite danger to pantheism, 
which gets so much intoxicated with the divine unity that 
it neglects nature and history, and discourages intellectual 
piety, and loses the insight into the revelation of God's good- 
ness and righteousness in the creation of the world. 

There are two kinds of intellectual impiety, one kind that 
goes astray after a secondary cause in place of a First Cause, 
and the other that passes by secondary causes as something 
unworthy of the True First Cause; not seeing that the true 
First Cause makes the world with three orders of being: the 
lower ministering to the higher and the higher to the lower: 
an inorganic below an organic realm; and within the organic 
realm creating the animal below the man, and among the 
races of man making savages below civilized peoples. It does 
not see that in all these divine goodness has its own great pur- 
pose — to make the world of time and space an infinite cradle 

'See Goethe's Fatist, "Scene in Heaven" (Part II, Act V, scene 7), 
Pater Profundus and Pater Seraphicus. 
XXXV [ 13 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

for the development of s^itual individuality. The Christian 
God is not an abstract one delighting only in abstract ones, 
but a Creator delighting in creators — commanding true be- 
lievers to engage in the eternal work of the First Cause, namely 
by multiplying his creative and educative work. 

Thus from one or another form of impiety of the intellect 
there arise collisions with the Church from age to age. 

A closer and closer definition of the dogma arises out of 
the struggle. 

One of the greatest epochs of struggle in the Church arose 
in the time of the importation of Arabian pantheism into 
Spain, and thence into the other parts of Europe by reason of 
resort of Christian youth to the medical schools established by 
the Arabs. 

The great commentators on Aristotle, Avicenna and Aver- 
rhoes, came to notice and caused great anxiety by their inter- 
pretation of Aristotle's doctrine of the active Reason (vou? 
TTOLTjTiKo^), wliicli tlicy liclcl to cxist only in God; and upon the 
death of the individual, the passive soul of reason (vovs 
Tra0r]TLK6<?), which is conceived by them as a temporary manifes- 
tation of the active Reason, withdrew and was absorbed into 
the deity, losing its individual being. 

To Christianity the doctrine of individual immortality is 
vital. Without it the world view of the Church would suffer 
dissolution. 

The publication of the pantheistic version of Aristotle forced 
Christian scholars to study seriously the Greek philosophy. 
Piety of the heart and piety of the will did not suffice. Piety 
of the intellect was needed, and it came in a series of thinkers 
who wrote the expositions of Christian theology of which the 
Summa Theologm of Thomas Aquinas is the great exemplar. 
Piety of the intellect overcame the dangers of religious heresy. 

After an epoch of rapid philosophical development — a period 
of a too exclusive devotion to the piety of the intellect — there 
came a decadence in the piety of the will and the piety of the 
heart, and when this began to have its visible effects in the neg- 
lect of the secular interests of the Church a reaction set in, which 
culminated in the triumoh of the pestilent doctrine of nominal- 
XXXV [ 14 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

ism through the dialectic skill of William of Occam, and as a 
consequence the great philosophy of Saint Thomas of Aquino 
fell into neglect. But this gave an opportunity for the triumph 
of the study of secondary causes. Natural science began new- 
inventories of nature and new studies of mind which set forth 
theories almost mechanical in their results. 

With nominaUsm no speculative investigations into the 
nature of a first cause are permissible. All that is left is an 
empirical study of things and events — an inventory and a 
classification; theories of forces; mechanical composition and 
decomposition of bodies; the transformation of sensations into 
ideas. Ideas were regarded as of the nature of mere opinions 
and of less truth than the sensations which furnished the only 
vivid certainty esteemed to be of real worth. 

There is bound to arise a reaction against religious authority 
whenever the Church itself neglects the exposition of the in- 
tellectual insights which are the most vital part of its contribu- 
tion to civilization. For if the Christian world view is ren- 
dered untenable, the piety of the will and the piety of the heart 
will soon decay. 

A series of skeptical reactions not only against the Church 
but against the authority of the State have taken place, as a 
result of this movement away from theology and toward an 
exclusive study of secondary causes. 

The German word Aujkldrung, or clearing- up of the mind, 
has become more or less familiar to us as including the phases 
of this revolt against authority. 

It holds to the study of secondary causes and the neglect of 
the First Cause. 

There has been only one great Aujklanmg, the French 
Revolution, which swept together all the negative tendencies 
into one movement of destruction to Church and State. But 
there are numerous, very numerous minor movements. In 
every department its influence is felt. 

In the last half of the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer 
occupied, and still occupies, much attention. It is interesting 
to note that in his generalizations of science he adopted the 
XXXV [ 15 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

agnostic view of his systeni from Hamilton and Mansell. 
Back of that view is Hume's skepticism, especially with regard 
to the category of causality, and it would not be difficult to 
trace his extreme nominalism to the stream of influence that 
William of Occam set flowing within the Church. 

Herbert Spencer's theory of the world resembles in a marked 
manner the doctrine of the Oriental mind that the world pro- 
cess finally comes to nothing. One after another, things and 
events appear and then vanish again, and all remains as at 
first.^ It is a Sisyphus movement with no permanent outcome 
and no worthy result. It begins with the homogeneous, un- 
differentiated condition of matter and moves toward hetero- 

* "Evolution," says Spencer, in that concise statement of his 
systeni fovind in his Autobiography, vol. i, p. 650-652, "Evolution . . • 
is a movement (6) not simply from homogeneity to heterogeneity, 
but from an indefinite homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity; 
and this trait of increasing definiteness, which accompanies the trait 
of increasing heterogeneity, is, like it, exhibited in the totality of 
things and in all its divisions and subdivisions down to the minutest. 
(7) Along with this redistribution of the matter composing an evolving 
aggregate, there goes on a redistribution of the retained motion of 
its components in relation to one another; this also becomes, step 
by step, more definitely heterogeneous. (13) Dissolution is the 
counter-change which sooner or later every evolved aggregate under- 
goes. Remaining exposed to surrounding forces that are unequili- 
briated, each aggregate is ever liable to be dissipated by the increase, 
gradual or sudden, of its contained motion; and its dissipation, 
quickly undergone by bodies lately animate, and slowly undergone 
by inanimate masses, remains to be undergone at an indefinitely 
remote period by each planetary and sl^ellar mass, which since an 
indefinitely distant period in the past has been slowly evolving, the 
cycle of its transformations being tlnis completed. (14) This rhythm 
of evolution and dissolution, completing itself during short periods 
in small aggregates, and in the vast aggregates distributed through 
space completing itself in periods which are immeasurable by human 
thought, is, so far as we can see, universal and eternal — each alter- 
nating phase of the process predominating, now in this region of 
space and now in that, as local conditions determine. (16) That 
which persists, unchanging in quantity but ever changing in form, 
under these sensible appearances which the Universe presents to 
us, transcends human knowledge and conception — is an unknown 
and unknowable Power, which Vv-e are obliged to recognize as without 
limit in space and without beginning or end in time." 

::xxv [ 16 J 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

geneity, individuality, and complexity of function. Evolution 
is this process of individualization. But all evolution is to be 
followed by dissolution, a return to the chaotic and unindividual- 
ized state of the homogeneous which Spencer considered to be 
unstable and, so to speak, impelled to evolution, but which 
in the end becomes unstable again and seeks its equilibrium 
in chaos. 

One of the chief leaders of the Aujkldrung has thus returned 
to Orientalism, and his infinite and eternal is only an unknown 
and unknowable power — he calls it "unknown and unknow- 
able, " though he let us clearly see that there is a shuttle motion 
produced by it out of chaos into individuality, and from in- 
dividuality back again into chaos. 

A creative goodness which lifts into being an infinity of other 
selves of animals and men, only to swallow them up again by 
a jealous reaction, drawing them down into the homogeneous 
ocean of chaotic matter, deserves rather to be called, as Plato 
in the TimcBUS, and Aristotle in his Metaphysics called it, envy 
and jealousy ((f)96uo<;), a quality of mind which they thought 
not possible to find in the idea of God as Creator. 

The only effective counter-movement against the Aujkldrung 
is the return to a study of the First Cause. 

This does not mean the neglect of secondary causes, but their 
proper adjustment. It is an application of the great results 
of religious thought — a social institutional kind of thinking 
that should be gone over by every individual for his enlighten- 
ment. The Church should elaborate its application of the 
thought of the First Cause to all secondary causes, showing in 
each case how the divine goodness connects and explains 
the entire movement from the mechanical to the chemical, 
and from these to the crystal, the plant, the animal, and to 
man. 

I review, in concluding my paper, the line of argument based 
on the second or causal aspect of experience : 

I. The first religious step is taken when all secondary 
causes are aggregated into one group and included in the 
world order in what we have called the first pole of experi- 
ence. Ancestor worship with its infinite series of finite spirits 
XXXV [ ^7 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

belongs only to a worldlR-dcr. A true originating causality, 
a first cause, belongs to a second and higher order, to a self- 
determining or originating order of being which transcends 
the world of things and events; all things and events depending 
upon a being derived from beyond, and not in themselves 
possessing self -existence; and the true second order possessing 
independence, self-existence, and the power to produce duality 
by consciousness, will, or some other form of self-determina- 
tion. 

2. The first thinking of this transcendent being becomes 
absorbed in the contemplation of its transcendence or sover- 
eignty over the first order. While the first order is dependent 
and must derive its support, all that it has, from a higher order 
of being, the second order is independent and can exist by 
itself. The religious contemplation is absorbed in this fact 
of independence or transcendence; it searches the origin of the 
dependent order in the sovereignty 'of the independent order; 
but it does not find at first, in the independent, the motive for 
the dependent. It halts in the thought of transcendence and 
denies reality to the world of things and events; it becomes 
pantheism or Orientalism; it denies creatorship in the first 
principle. 

3. The result of the first insight into the presupposition of 
dependent being has reached an independent being which 
is devoid of true causality and which does not impart its true 
being to a derived world; this is pantheism. But, again, this 
result contradicts the presupposition on which the insight into 
the second order is based. For unless there is presupposed a 
true originating causality, a self-determining One, the higher 
order of being exists only in itself and not for itself ; its caus- 
ality is not real to itself; if its causality produces only a 
world of phcnomcnality and illusion, then the result of its 
causality is only to reveal to the independent being its own 
inefficiency as a cause; it is a cause which cannot produce 
anything real, hence it is not a true cause. 

4. The history of the religions of Asia is a history of the 
discovery of the self-contradictions of pantheism — of a true 
causal being which does not truly cause. It is also a series 

XXXV [ 18 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

of attempted solutions to introduce true causality without 
destroying the transcendence or sovereignty of the First Cause. 
For to introduce any finite motive, that is to say, any motive 
depending upon another underived being, would destroy the 
perfection of the first original cause and reduce it to a secondary 
cause and thus throw back the entire investigation to the stage 
of ancestor worship. The escape from this dilemma, which 
offers a choice between the destruction of the imperfect world 
and the destruction of the perfect world, or its renunciation by 
philosophic thought, is found in the doctrine of the Logos 
and its complete exposition in the Christian doctrine of the 
Trinity. 

5. True causality is the self-revelation of the highest order 
of being. But it does not in its pure self-determination reach 
secondary causes. Its action in itself is the revelation of a 
perfect in a perfect; this is the doctrine of the Logos. Per- 
fect self-determination results in perfect revelation in another; 
an eternal object becomes an eternal subject whose thinking 
and wiUing are one, and hence goodness and righteousness. 
Through this thought it is explained how the primary causality 
in the Logos becomes secondary causality through the con- 
templation of goodness and righteousness as the inner essence of 
causahty. 

6. The Christian view of the world, therefore, does not com- 
promise its idea of the transcendency or sovereignty of the 
First Cause, but preserves it perfectly and at the same time in- 
troduces transcendency into the world order by the doctrine 
of the immortahty, freedom, and responsibility of the human 
soul, who through religious insight interprets the entire world 
order as a process of creation and salvation; the process of 
creating souls with independent individuality and infinite 
powers of self-development in will and intellect, in goodness 
and righteousness. Consciousness proceeds through science 
and philosophy and theology everlastingly toward a completer 
comprehension of the divine method of creation of real being, 
that is to say, of moral beings through the inorganic and the 
organic processes in time and space and through the discipline 
of moral beings by means of their historic experience of life. 

XXXV [ 19 ] 



CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION 

This development of con^feusncss makes possible Ihc co-opera- 
tion of the human will with the divine will. This is the ulti- 
mate cause presupposed by secondary causation. It is the 
second aspect of experience. 

7. This view of the world elevates it into the highest signifi- 
cance, not through its secondary causes, but through its first 
cause as the divine self-activity in its goodness and righteous- 
ness. It is infinite grace. 

8. This view of the world makes secondary causes signifi- 
cant in the light of the First Cause. It makes the history of 
nature thus interpreted a part of the book of divine revela- 
tion, 

9. With the pantheistic interpretation, the divine purpose 
disappears from the realm of secondary causes, and with this 
there vanishes all true causality and high significance to science. 
For the objects of science, namely, material nature and human 
history, when separated from the divine and devoid of a share 
in the causal activity of a transcendent being who is a real 
cause, become a chaos of illusion, the East Indian Maya. 

10. In the ruder forms of religion, the varieties of ancestor 
worship and fetichism, science has no place, because all sec- 
ondary causes become capricious activities of spiritual beings 
not subordinated to a first principle of goodness and righteous- 
ness. 

11. It follows from these considerations that social culture 
in the form of the Church and the School as independent in- 
stitutions becomes possible only on the basis of the rchgious 
world view of Christianity; and that the perennial continuance 
of the world view of Christianity through the special form of 
social culture which belongs to the Church is a necessary con- 
dition presupposed bv the forms of social culture intrusted to 
the School. 



XXXV [ 20 ] 



XXXVI 



THE MYSTERIES 

"WHAT HAS PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 
ACCOMPLISHED?" 

BY 

WILLIAM F. BARRETT 

PRESIDENT OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 



T/f/^E. approach the borderland of fainter knowledge. Re- 
ligion has always had Superstition as a handmaid, 
and, jollo'iving somewhere in her train, come vaguer, immaterial 
things, magic and mystery, half -hinted communications with 
an unseen world, the immaterial made manifest and visible in 
matter. There was a day not over long ago when we thought 
we could afford to laugh at all these "manifestations," when 
most of us took our ground in fancied security on the assertion 
that all matter and all life were subject solely to material laws, 
that spiritualism was to be classed with the ghost stories of our 
childhood, that thought trans ferrence was on a par with "sleight- 
of-hand" performances upon the stage, and that mesmerism was 
but another name for fraud. In brief, the "influence of mind 
on matter" was dismissed as an empty form of words, a figure 
of speech wholly dissociate from physical fact. That day has 
gone by. There is something behind all these studies of the oc- 
cult, something toward which earnest scientific investigation is 
dimly reaching. Perhaps that weird "subconscious self" of 
which we grow dimly aware is becoming more developed, more 
positively assertive. Perhaps that extra " sixth sense," of which 
our poets have dreamed and prophesied, begins to stir within us. 
Such suggestions, of course, are still but fantasies, yet there is 
something underlying them, something as yet inexplicable, but 
XXXVI [ I ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

inexorable, inevitable. S4t^ce no longer laughs at psychical 
research, nor can any intelligent man afford to do so. Rather 
must we hold ourselves alert, receptive, eager to seize upon and 
welcome the kernel of truth when it can at last be separated 
from the husk of falsehood and deception in which it has been too 
long enwrapped. What has so far been done to separate husk 
and kernel is here pointed out for us by Professor Barrett, 
former President of the English ^^ Society for Psychical Research.''^ 
Mr. Barrett is no amateur investigator, but a leading educator 
of distinguished reputation, Professor of Physics in the Royal 
College of Science, Dublin. 

I AM sometimes asked what our Society has already 
achieved, what it has done to justify its existence ? The reply 
to this is found in the eighteen closely printed volumes of our 
Proceedings, and the eleven volumes of our Journal, containing 
an immense mass of evidence, the record of carefully sifted 
observations or of stringent experiments. These form a store- 
house of material which we have every reason to believe will 
become increasingly valuable to students of both psychology 
and philosophy in the not distant future. Unquestionably a 
change of opinion is gradually coming about through the work 
of our Society. The widespread and unreasoning prejudice 
which 25 years ago existed against all psychical inquiry is 
breaking down. This is seen in the list of distinguished men 
who have become members of our Society, and here I desire to 
welcome one of our great English savants, a man of European 
reputation, who has recently joined our ranks, and this coinci- 
dently with his election to the high position of joint honorary 
secretary to the Royal Society. 

But although there is a more open mind on the part of science 
toward psychical research, it must be confessed it is still looked 
at somewhat askance by the leaders and organs of official 
science. It is worth a moment's attention to consider why this 
should be. No one asserts that the knowledge we are seeking 
to obtain is unimportant, for, as the learned Dr. Glanville said 
200 years ago about similar subjects to those we are studying: 
"These things relate to our biggest interests; if established, 

XXXVI [ 2 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

they secure some of the outworks of religion." Nor, so far as 
I know, does any one assert we are hasty and incautious, or 
unscientific in our method of investigation. No doubt one 
reason for the present attitude of oflicial science toward us 
has been the prevalence and paralyzing influence of a material- 
istic philosophy, which denies the possibility of mind without 
a material brain, or of any means of access from other minds 
to our mind except through the recognized channels of sen- 
sation. Both these propositions are of course denied by our 
religious teachers, who assert that a spiritual world does exist, 
and that the inspired writings were given supersensuously 
to man. Nevertheless, as a body, though with some notable 
exceptions, even they do not welcome us with open arms. 
The common ground and official view of both science and 
religion are that all extension to our existing knowledge in 
their respective departments can only come through the channels 
recognized by each; in the one case the channel is bounded 
by the five senses, and in the other case it is that sanctioned 
by authority. We must all admit that even unconsciously 
authority has a large share in moulding our convictions and 
determining our conduct; in fact, we cannot emancipate our- 
selves from its subtle influence. As a rule this is beneficial, 
unless it can be shown that authority is untrustworthy ; but 
the attempt to prove that it is so is sure to be an ungracious 
and difficult task, and almost certain to bring odium to bear 
upon those who, if they eventually prove to be right, are in a 
subsequent generation hailed as benefactors of the race. 

Some years ago that most learned man, the late Professor 
von Helmholtz, visited Dublin. I had then recently published 
a paper, giving for the first time prima facie evidence of some- 
thing new to science, called thought transferrence, now known 
as telepathy. Helmholtz, who was a great physiologist as well 
as physicist, had some conversation with me on the subject, and 
he ended by saying: "I cannot believe it. Neither the testi- 
mony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the 
evidence of my own senses, would lead me to believe in the 
transmission of thought from one person to another indepen- 
dently of the recognized channels of sensation. It is clearly 
XXXVI [ 3 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

impossible." The respe^hat is due to so great a man renders 
it necessary to show in a^v words why tliis statement (one that 
used to be common enough) is wholly indefensible. First, the 
phenomena in question, and all the phenomena within the scope 
of our Society, are not contradictions, but merely extensions of 
our existing knowledge ; they may be strange and inexplicable, 
but that merely indicates that the evidence in support of the 
new facts must be recognized as adequate. As Laplace long 
ago said in his "Theory of Probabilities" : "We are so far from 
knowing all the agents of nature, and their various modes of 
action, that it would not be philosophical to deny any phenom- 
ena merely because in the actual state of our knowledge they 
are inexplicable. This only ought we to do — in proportion to 
the difficulty there seems to be in admitting the facts, should 
be the scrupulous attention we bestow on their examination."* 
That this is the true spirit may be seen from the recent dis- 
coveries in connection with radium. These facts appeared even 
to contradict some of our previous knowledge. We always 
thought of an atom, as Lucretius did, "strong in solid single- 
ness," as the most immutable and immortal thing in the physi- 
cal universe. Now it appears to be capable of disintegration 
and transmutation, and the views of the alchemists are begin- 
ning to revive: soon we may be looking for the "philosopher's 
stone" — the substance that by its presence enables the trans- 
mutation of other heavy atoms to come about. Thus does the 
whirligig of time bring its revenges. 

But to return. There is another fallacy in the scientific view 
expressed by Helmholtz. He said, as many do, that nothing 
could make him believe in such phenomena. But belief is not 
a voluntary act of the mind, it cannot be given or withheld at 
pleasure; it is, obviously, an involuntary state, which follows if 
our judgment considers the evidence adduced adequate and 
conclusive. We can, of course, as many do, refuse to listen to 
the evidence ; and it is worth noticing that in all our minds there 
is a tendency to repel the intrusion of any ideas unrelated to our 
usual habits of thought and which therefore involve an uncom- 
fortable dislocation of our mind: so that attention to evidence 
* Laplace, Theorie analytiquc dcs Probabilites, Introd., p. 43. 

XXXVI [ 4 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

of this character is a difficult act of sclf-conqucst. Hence every 
new departure in thought has to encounter great aberrations 
of mind. Rut when attention is given, and the evidence 
considered adequate, it is sheer nonsense to say you won't 
believe it. 

Is there any other ground why science should not ungrudg- 
ingly recognize the evidence so amply given in our Proceed- 
ings? I have recently made inquiries among some of my 
scientific friends who stand aloof from us, to know what is 
their reason for so doing. Of course life is short, the claim of 
each particular branch of scientific investigation becomes in- 
creasingly exacting, and but few have time to consider the 
evidence. This is obvious, Ijut why do they shrug their shoul- 
ders when you mention, say, telepathy, or the faculty of dous- 
ing? Their attitude reminds me of an anecdote told by that 
remarkable woman, Miss Caroline Fox, and which I think 
is mentioned in the memorials of her life. The charming resi- 
dence of Miss Fox in Cornwall was the meeting ground of 
many famous men of the last generation. On one occasion that 
great Irishman, Sir W. Rowan Hamilton, there met Sir G. 
Airy, then Astronomer-Royal. Hamilton had just pub- 
lished his famous mathematical discovery of quaternions, and 
was, I believe, explaining it to Airy. After a short time Airy 
said, "I cannot see it at all." Hamilton replied, "I have been 
investigating the matter closely for many months, and I am cer- 
tain of its truth." "Oh," rejoined Airy, "I have been thinking 
over it for the last two or three minutes, and there is nothing in 
it." This is why some of our scientific friends shrug their 
shoulders at our researches. They feel competent, after a few 
minutes' consideration, to reject conclusions which may have 
cost us years of investigation. 

In fact, nine-tenths of the positive opinions we are accus- 
tomed to hear about psychical research are given judicially. 
That is, the objector speaks of his conclusions as positively as if 
it were his office to know the truth, and implies that any opposi- 
tion is a thing for him to judge of. "He is annihilated," as 
Professor De Morgan pointed out some time ago, "by being 
reduced, no matter how courteously, from judge to counsel. 
XXXVI [ 5 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

But this is what must be done. The jurisdiction must be denied. 
The great art is not to pu^^im off the bench without ceremony, 
but to pull the bench from under him, without his exactly seeing 
how he came to tumble, and without proceeding to sit upon it 
yourself." 

Inquiry among my scientific friends has shown me that the 
root of much, perhaps most, of the scientific skepticism toward 
our work is not because the phenomena are startling or inex- 
plicable, but because they cannot be repeated at pleasure; hence 
so very few scientific men have the opportunity of verifying the 
observations some of us have made. They do not doubt our 
good faith, but they think we may have been mistaken in our 
conclusions, and until we can reproduce the phenomena before 
them they feel justified in distrusting our results. This might 
well give ground for suspense of judgment, but surely not for 
any hostile attitude. It is, of course, most desirable to be able 
to repeat our experiments at pleasure, but the very nature of our 
inquiry precludes this. We do not refuse to believe in the fall 
of meteoric stones unless we can see one falling. We may 
require a good deal of well-attested evidence for their fall, but 
once the fact is established the stringency of the evidence 
demanded immediately relaxes. Now, unquestionably there 
are at present more capable witnesses who can speak from per- 
sonal and careful inquiry as to the fact of telepathy, or of what 
is called spiritualistic phenomena, than there are persons living 
who can testify to having seen the actual fall from space of 
meteoric stones. 

The fact is, our scientific friends do not realize the profound 
difference that exists between the conditions of a physical and 
of a psychical experiment. We know what conditions are 
requisite in the former case, we do not know what they arc in 
the latter, and hence the difficulty of all psychical investigation 
and the uncertainty of the reproduction of any given phe- 
nomenon. 

A moment's consideration shows that the demand made upon 
us by science for the demonstration at any moment of a par- 
ticular psychical phenomenon is inconsistent with the very 
XXXVI [ 6 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

object of our inquiry. Psychical experiments depend on the 
mental state of the subject; you may tell a person to do some- 
thing, but whether he docs it or not depends on the person 
addressed. Physical experiments are independent of our voli- 
tion; a magnet attracts iron, or sets itself in the magnetic 
meridian, irrespective of our mental condition. This obvious 
difference between the two sets of phenomena is constantly 
overlooked. Physical science excludes from its survey the ele- 
ment of personality, with which we have to deal and over which 
we have little or no control. It regards all phenomena as 
strictly impersonal, and finds abundant field for investigation 
within the narrow limits it has marked out for itself: these 
things it regards as real, the rest as shadowy. The truth is, 
of course, exactly the reverse. The reality of which we arc 
conscious is our self, our personality. It is the phenomena of 
external nature which are shadowy; shadows cast by some 
reality of which our senses tell us absolutely nothing. 

There is, however, no reason why the methods so success- 
fully pursued by science should not also be pursued in the study 
of the complex and shifting phenomena of human personality. 
Now, this is precisely the object of our Society — the accurate 
investigation of that wide range of obscure but wonderful 
powers included within the mysterious thing we call our self. 
Albeit we are but at the beginning of a task so vast that it may, 
in time to come, make all the discoveries of physical science 
seem trivial, all its labors seem insignificant in comparison 
with the stupendous problems that are before us. 

We need, therefore, much more experimental evidence in 
every department of our work. So long ago as 1876, in a paper 
read before the British Association in that year, I stated that 
before science could attack with any hope of success the inves- 
tigation of alleged spiritualistic phenomena, we must know 
whether definite ideas can unconsciously be communicated from 
one person to another: whether such a thing as thought trans- 
ferrence does really exist. Evidence was adduced in favor of 
this hypothesis. We have done much since then, but much 
remains to be done before telepathy can take its place as an 
accepted axiom of scientific knowledge. 
XXXVI [ 7 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

There is one question in regard to telepathy and similar 
psychical phenomena wlTOi is likely to remain an outstanding 
difficulty. By what process can one mind affect another at a 
distance? Physical science teaches us that there is no such 
thing as "action at a distance." Energy at a distance reaches 
us either by the translation of matter through space, like a 
flying bullet, which carries the energy; or by the intermediary 
action of some medium, like the transmission of sound-bearing 
waves through the air, or of luminiferous waves through the 
ether, the energy being handed on from wave to wave. We 
may talk of brain waves, but that is only unscientific talk; we 
know of nothing of the kind. Neither do we know how gravi- 
tation acts across space : by what means such tremendous forces 
as bind the solar system together are either exerted or trans- 
mitted we know absolutely nothing. We don't talk of gravita- 
tion waves, we wait for further knowledge on this mysterious 
problem; and in like manner we must patiently wait for more 
light on the mode of transmission of thought through space. 
It may well be that thought transcends both matter and space, 
and has no relation to either; that mass, space, and time may 
only be but the mental symbols we form of our present 
material system, and have no ultimate reality in themselves. 

Another question is as follows: May not the uncertainty 
and difficulty of our experiments in thought transf errence partly 
arise from the fact that we are not going to work the right 
way ? We try to obtain evidence of the transmission of a word 
or idea through some conscious and voluntary act on the part of 
the percipient. We wait for a verbal or written response. Is 
not this a mistake ? Ought we not rather to seek for evidence of 
thought transf errence in the region of the subconscious life? 
I believe in the case of both agent and percipient the con- 
scious will plays only a secondary part. This is also true, I 
think, in all cases of suggestion, and of the therapeutic effect of 
suggestion. It is notably seen in the cures wrought by what is 
known as Christian Science. I happen to have had occasion to 
study these somewhat carefully of late, and undoubtedly re- 
markable cures are effected, it may be by suggestion, but with- 
out the usual suggestive treatment; the only formula is the 
XXXVI [ 8 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

"Allness of God" and the "non-cxistcnce of disease." But 
the heahng processes are set going by a purely subconscious 
act. And so in telepathy, we need to hand over the whole mat- 
ter to the subliminal activities. The difficulty is how to do this. 
Hypnosis is one way. And in the ordinary waking state the 
agent, who makes the suggestion or transmits the idea, would, 
I believe, do so more effectively if, after the intention had 
soaked into his mind, he left it alone, so far as any conscious 
effort was concerned. And the percipient should be as passive 
as possible, make no effort to guess the word, but allow the per- 
ception to reveal itself through some involuntary action. Auto- 
matic writing would be the most effective, but that is not very 
common; the twisting of the forked dousing twig might be 
utilized, indicating the letters of the alphabet by its motion; 
or in other ways. In the historical researches I have made on 
the so-called divining rod, I found it was used in this very 
manner two centuries ago. In fact what we need to learn is 
the language of the subliminal Hfe, how it speaks to us, how we 
can speak to it. The voluntary action of the muscles in speech 
or gesture is the language of our conscious life; the involuntary 
action of our muscles, and emotional disturbance, appear to be 
the language of the subconscious life. 

Then another point should be noticed, the frequent lagging 
of the impression in the percipient. I observed this again and 
again in my first experiments in thought transferrence twenty-five 
years ago. The correct reply to a previous experiment would 
sometimes come in answer to a later and different experiment. 
I have noticed the same thing also in dousing; with some dousers 
the motion of the twig lags behind the moment of the impression ; 
it turns after the douser has passed a little beyond the right 
spot. We have precisely similar phenomena in physical 
science. The magnetic state of iron lags a little behind the 
magnetizing force it is subjected to ; this is known as hysteresis, 
from a Greek word signifying to lag behind. So I believe there 
is a psychical as well as a physical hysteresis, and if so, it 
should be reckoned with in our experiments. It is improbable 
that any psychical action, even of telepathy, occurs without 
some preceding change in the nerve tissues ; in technical phrase- 
XXXVI [ 9 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

ology, neurosis must alw^^ precede psychosis ; and then this 
change must rise till it i^f sufficient magnitude to create the 
reflex that moves the muscles. And all this involves time, 
which may be greater or less, and so account for the occasional 
lag we observe. 

Other questions suggest themselves. Is it the idea or the 
word, the motion or the expression of the emotion, that is 
transmitted in telepathy ? Probably the idea. If so, it affords 
a hint toward the interchange of thought among the race in 
spite of differences of language. Language is but a clumsy 
instrument of thought, and quite incommensurate to it; its 
arbitrary signs show it to be but the rudiments of a system 
which the evolutionary progress of the race may lead us to hope 
will be more perfect in the future. How much more accurately 
should we be able to transmit complex ideas and subtle emotions 
if thought could evoke thought without the mechanism of 
speech. This may now be the case in the state of life in the 
unseen. The sanctity and privacy of our minds will, however, 
require to be protected from unwelcome intrusion, and this, so 
far as our conscious life is concerned, will doubtless be within 
our own power to effect, so long as we retain control over our 
selfhood, our true personality.^ 

Then, again, may not animals share with man this telepathic 
power ? They have in some directions keener perceptive facul- 
ties than man, and there is evidence that they are strongly 
affected by what we call apparitions. It may be that animals, 
and insects like the ant and the bee, do communicate with each 
other by some process analogous to telepathy. It is worth try- 
ing to find out whether, say, a favorite dog can respond to a 
telepathic impact from his master. In centuries to come it is 
just possible that through some such interchange of feelings we 
may get into closer communion with all sentient things. 

There is one argument in favor of the existence of some- 
thing analogous to thought transferrence, which — so far as I 

' In that remarkable book published some seventy years ago, Isaac 
Taylor's Physical Theory of Another Life (chap, viii.), will be found a 
prevision of telepathy and of some of the ideas contained in the fore- 
going paragraph. 

XXXVI [ lO ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

know — has not been used, and it is, I think, a legitimate argu- 
ment, for it is based upon the underlying unity that exists 
throughout Nature. The theory of gravitation teaches us that 
every grain of sand on every seashore in this world, every particle 
of salt in every salt cellar, is forever pulling every grain of sand 
or salt, not only on this earth, but on every planet, or star, in the 
whole universe. And vice versa, for there is a reciprocal in- 
fluence ever going on between these myriads of remote things. 
Nay, more, such is the solidarity of the universe that an in- 
terchange of radiation, as well of attraction, is ever taking 
place between things on this earth, and also between our planet 
and every member of the solar system. No fact in physical 
science is more certain than this. May not this "theory of 
exchanges," this mobile equilibrium, extend to the psychical 
as well as the physical universe? Tennyson, with poetic pre- 
science, asks in "Aylmer's Field": 

"Star to star vibrates light, may soul to soul 
Strike through a finer element of her own? " 

Certainly it seems very probable that every centre of con- 
sciousness is likely to react telcpathically upon every other 
centre.^ 

' Since this address was delivered my attention has been drawn to 
Mrs. Browning's striking sonnet on "Life," wherein the same idea is 
elaborated: poets are certainly wonderful pioneers of thought. Before 
telepathy was thought of, Mrs. Browning wrote: 

"Each creature holds an insular point in space; 
Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound. 
But all the multitudinous beings round 
In all the countless worlds, with time and place 
For their conditions, down to the central base, 
Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound. 
Life answering life across the vast profound. 
In full antiphony, by a common grace? 
I think this sudden joyaunce which illumes 
A child's mouth sleeping, unaware may run 
From some soul newly loosened from earth's tombs; 
I think this passionate sigh, which half begun 
I stifle back, may reach and stir the plumes 
Of God's calm angel standing in the sun." 

XXXVI [ II ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

It is hard to belie ve4ffat the play of vital forces should be 
more restricted than that of the physical forces; that radio-activ- 
ities should be confined to inanimate matter. If this uncon- 
scious radiation and reaction is going on between mind and 
mind, then observed cases of telepathy would simply mean the 
awakening of consciousness to the fact in certain minds. Why 
some and not all minds, and why so fitfully the conscious per- 
ception should be aroused, are problems we must leave to the 
future; they are quite consistent with what we find everywhere 
in nature. For my own part, I am disposed to think this inter- 
change is common to the race, and is the chief reason why all 
men are insensibly moulded by their environment. Only, as I 
said just now, I believe the telepathic exchange emanates from 
and effects the subconscious part of our personality. It is 
potentially conscious, and may, and probably will eventually, 
become an integral part of our self-consciousness. 

We know as a matter of fact that a vast number of impres- 
sions are constantly being made upon us, of which we take no 
heed; they do not interest us, or they are not strong enough to 
arouse consciousness. But the impressions are there, they 
leave a mark upon us, though we are not aware of it, and they 
may float to the surface, or be evoked at some future time. One 
of the most certain and striking results of the investigations 
made by our Society is that the content of our subconscious 
life is far greater than that of our conscious life. Our minds 
are like a photographic plate, sensitive to all sorts of impres- 
sions, but our ego develops only a few of these impressions; 
these are our conscious perceptions, the rest are latent, awaiting 
development, which may come in sleep, hynopsis, or trance, or 
by the shock of death, or after death. 

But even here and now this subconscious radio-activity of 
thought may already play some part in the growing sense of 
sympathy and humanity we find in the race. And what a 
change would be wrought if it were suddenly to become an 
element of consciousness among mankind. To realize the 
brotherhood of the race would not then be a pious aspiration or 
a strenuous effort, but the reality of all others most vividly 
before us; involuntary sharers in one another's pleasures and 
XXXVI [12] 



THE MYSTERIES 

pains, the welfare of our fellow-men would be the factor in our 
lives which would dominate all our conduct. What would be 
the use of a luxurious club and Parisian cooks if the privation 
and suffering of the destitute were telepathically part and par- 
cel of our lives ? Slowly the race does seem to be awakening 
to the sense of a larger self, which embraces the many in the 
One, to 

"A heart that beats 
In all its pulses with the common heart 
Of humankind, which the same things make glad, 
The same make sorry." 

The instinct of true religion, like the insight of the true poet, 
arrives at some great verity without the process of reasoning or 
the need of proof. Thus it has been with the belief in prayer 
and in the efficacy of prayer. Skepticism scoffs at a mystery 
which involves the direct action of mind on mind and the still 
greater mystery of the movement of the Infinite by the finite — 
but faith remains unshaken. For us wayfaring men, however, 
reason needs some help in climbing the steeps attained by faith. 
And is not this help afforded by the steps slowly being cut in 
the upward path by means of psychical research? What is 
telepathy but the proof of the reasonableness of prayer? No 
longer need our reason rest content with the plausible explana- 
tion that prayer can do no more than evoke a subjective re- 
sponse in the suppliant ; that it is unconceivable how the Infinite 
and the finite mind, the One manifest in the many, can have 
any community of thought. On the contrary, if telepathy be 
indisputable, if our creaturely minds can, without voice or sen- 
sation, impress each other, the Infinite mind is likely thus to 
have revealed itself in all ages to responsive human hearts. 
Some may have the spiritual ear, the open vision, but to all of 
us there comes at times the echo of that larger life which is 
slowly expressing itself in humanity as the ages gradually 
unfold. In fact the teaching of science has ever been that we 
are not isolated in, or from, the great cosmos ; the light of suns 
and stars reaches us, the mysterious force of gravitation binds 
the whole material universe into an organic whole, the minutest 
XXXVI [ 13 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

molecule and the most dlPknt orb are bathed in one and the self- 
same medium. But surely beyond and above all these material 
links is the solidarity of mind. As the essential significance 
and unity of a honeycomb are not in the cells of wax, but in the 
common life and purpose of the builders of those cells, so the 
true significance of nature is not in the material world, but in 
the mind that gives to it a meaning, and that underlies and 
unites, that transcends and creates, the phenomenal world 
through which for a moment each of us is passing. " The things 
which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen 
are eternal," 

I will now turn for a few minutes to another branch of our 
researches, which has special interest for me, as it was this 
subject that first aroused my interest in experimental psychology, 
and to which I gave many months of experimenting long before 
our Society was founded. I refer to hypnotism. 

There are no doubt many present who remember the outcry 
that was once raised against the investigation of hypnotism, 
then called mesmerism. Constant attacks were made by the 
medical and scientific world on the one hand, and by the reli- 
gious world on the other, upon the early workers at this subject. 
They were denounced as impostors, shunned as pariahs, and 
unceremoniously pitched out of the synagogues of both science 
and religion; and this within my own memory. Physiological 
and medical science can only hang its head in shame when it 
looks back upon that period. ' What do we find to-day — the sub- 
ject of hypnotism and its therapeutic value recognized! It has 
now become an integral part of scientific teaching and investi- 
gation in several medical schools, more especially on the Con- 
tinent. I think our Society may fairly lay claim to have con- 
tributed to this change of view, and the work of our members, 
Edmund Gurney, and Drs. Arthur Myers, Milne Bramwell, and 
Lloyd Tuckey, has added much to the knowledge of a subject 
the importance of which it is difhcult to overrate. It is also 
worthy of note how the former neglect on this subject by science 
relegated it to the ignorant and the charlatan, and its practice 
to mysterious and often mischievous public amusements. 
These are now less common; and though the public apprehen- 
XXXVI [ 14 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

sion of the dangerous abuse of hypnotism is grossly exaggerated, 
for it is less open to abuse than chloroform, I, for one, am 
strongly of opinion that we, as a Society, should discourage, 
and (as in many Continental countries) get the legislature to 
forbid, the practice of hypnotism except under proper medical 
supervision. 

Now, I think it is the duty of our Society to cherish the 
memory of these courageous seekers after truth, who were the 
pioneers in this and other branches of psychical research. The 
splendid and self-sacrificing labors of those distinguished phy- 
sicians, Drs. Elliotson and Esdaile, in the fields of hypnotic 
therapeutics and painless surgery under hypnosis, should never 
be forgotten, any more than the later work of Dr. Braid of 
Manchester, Dr. Elliotson, though at the head of his pro- 
fession, sacrificed everything for the advancement of this branch 
of knowledge. The mesmeric hospital in London, and the 
similar hospital founded in Calcutta by an enlightened Gov- 
ernor-General and placed under the care of Dr. Esdaile, did 
remarkable work, too little known at the present day. I am 
therefore glad to see in Dr. Milne Bramwell's magnum optis on 
hypnotism that he draws special attention to the labors of 
Elliotson, Esdaile, and Braid. And it is to be regretted how 
completely these pioneers are ignored in the works on sugges- 
tive therapeutics by Dr. Bernheim, Dr. Liebeault, Dr. Scho- 
field, and some others. 

Leaving this part of our subject, now within the purview of 
science, let us pass to the extreme or advanced wing of psychi- 
cal research; to that part of our work on which considerable 
differences of opinion exist even within our Society. I refer 
to spirituahstic phenomena. With regard to these we must 
all agree that indiscriminate condemnation on the one hand, 
and ignorant credulity on the other, are the two most mis- 
chievous elements with which we are confronted in connec- 
tion with this subject. It is because we, as a Society, feel that 
in the fearless pursuit of truth it is the paramount duty of 
science to lead the way, that the scornful attitude of the scientific 
world toward even the investigation of these phenomena is so 
XXXVI [ 15 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

much to be dcprccatcd.^^cncc, as in the case of those who 
were pioneers in the study of hypnotism, we ought not to for- 
get the small band of investigators who before our time had 
the courage, after patient inquiry, to announce their belief in 
what, for want of any better theory, they called spiritualistic 
phenomena. No doubt we can pick holes in their method of 
investigation, but they were just as honest, just as earnest seekers 
after truth, as we claim to be, and they deserve more credit 
than we can lay claim to, for they had to encounter greater 
opposition and vituperation. The superior person then, as 
now, smiled at the credulity of those better informed than 
himself. I suppose we are all apt to fancy our own power of 
discernment and of sound judgment to be somewhat better 
than our neighbors'. But, after all, is it not the common sense, 
the care, the patience, and the amount of uninterrupted atten- 
tion we bestow upon any psychical phenomena we are investi- 
gating that give value to the opinion at which we arrive, and 
not the particular cleverness or skepticism of the observer ? The 
lesson we all need to learn is that what even the humblest of 
men affirm from their own experience is always worth listen- 
ing to, but what even the cleverest of men, in their ignorance, 
deny is never worth a moment's attention. 

The acute and powerful intellect of Professor De Morgan, 
the great exposer of scientific humbug, long ago said, and he 
had the courage publicly to state, that however much the 
Spiritualists might be ridiculed, they were undoubtedly on the 
track that has led to all advancement in knowledge, for they had 
the spirit and method of the old times, when paths had to be cut 
through the uncleared forests in which we can now easily walk.^ 
Their spirit was that of universal examination unchecked by 
the fear of being detected in the investigation of nonsense. This 
was the spirit that animated the Florentine Academicians and 
the first Fellows of the Royal Society two hundred and fifty 
years ago; they set to work to prove all things that they might 
hold fast to that which was good. And their method was that 
of all scientific research, viz., to start a theory and see how it 

1 See Preface of From Matter to Spirit, p. xviii. 

XXXVI [ i6 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

worked. Without a theory "facts are a mob, not an army." 
Meteorology at the present moment is buried under a vast mob 
of observations for want of ingenuity in devising theories; any 
working hypothesis is better than none at all. And so I agree 
with De Morgan that the most sane and scientific method in 
psychical research is not to be afraid of propounding a theory 
because it may seem extraordinary, but to have courage to do 
so and see if it works. The theory of thought transferrence led 
to the accumulation of evidence which bids fair, sooner or 
later, to place telepathy among the established truths of science. 

The amusing feature in the progress of knowledge is that, 
usually, critics who resist as long as they can a new theory are 
apt afterwards, when the theory becomes widely accepted, to 
use it indiscriminately, as if it covered all obscure phenomena; 
and so it becomes a kind of fetich in their thoughts. We are all 
familiar with the imposture theory, with the coincidence theory, 
and with the telepathic theory; each excellent in its way, but 
most foolish and unscientific if we allow any one of them to 
obscure our vision or paralyze our investigation. What is 
to be reprobated, as De Morgan said, "is not the wariness 
which widens and lengthens inquiry, but the assumption which 
prevents and narrows it." 

Instances are well known of the most acute and careful 
in(|uircrs, trained physical detectives we might call them, who 
having begun with a priori reasoning and resolute skepticism, 
when they have thrown aside their preconceived assumptions, 
and given the necessary time and patience to the investigation 
of one particular case, have gone over to the spiritualistic camp. 
They may be right or wrong in their present opinion, but we 
must all admit they have far better reasons for forming a 
judgment than any of us can have. If they are right, it follows 
that the particular case they have investigated is not likely to be 
a solitary one, but typical of similar cases with us as well as 
with them. 

Pray do not suppose I hold a brief on behalf of spiritualism 

either as a practice or as a religion. On tlie contrary, to my 

mind, few things are more dismal than the common run of 

spiritualistic seances. Sometimes they revolt one's feelings, 

XXXVI [ 17 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

and always they arc a ^iarincss to the flesh. Perhaps the 
manifold experiences I have had have been unfortunate, and I 
freely admit my remarks apply more particularly to sittings 
with professional mediums, where what are called physical 
manifestations take place, which always seem to be on a lower 
plane, even where the possibility of fraud has been carefully 
excluded. Nevertheless, if we can get at truth, what does it 
matter whether we draw it from a well or drag it from a bog? 

It is impossible, however, not to feel some sympathy with 
the common objection of the doubter that the phenomena are of 
so paltry a character. But we cannot prescribe to nature, we 
cannot get rid of the leprosy of doubt by choosing rivers of 
our own to wash in. And so we must be content with what we 
find. After all, from a scientific point of view, nothing can be 
paltry or mean that manifests life. 

Bacteriologists spend their days searching for evidence of the 
lowest forms of life. And surely any evidence of personality 
that gives us the faintest, rudest sign that life still persists, 
though the clothing of the body be gone, is worth infinite trou- 
ble to attain. Though it may be 

"Only a signal shown and a voice from out of the darkness,'' 

it is not paltry. In fine, it is this natural human longing that 
renders a dispassionate consideration of the facts, a calm and 
critical weighing of the evidence, so difficult and yet so impera- 
tive. 

We must, however, bear in mind, as was pointed out by the 
present Prime Minister, in the remarkable address he delivered 
from this chair, that if science had first attempted to include 
in its survey not only physical but psychical phenomena it 
might for centuries have lost itself in dark and diflicult regions, 
and the work of science to-day would then have been less, not 
more complete.^ This is very true; the foundations of our 
faith in the undeviating order of nature had to be laid by the 
investigation of the laws of matter and motion and by the 

^ Proceedings S. P. R., Vol. X., p. 5. 

XXXVI [ 18 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

discoveiy of the orderly evolution of life. What science has 
now established is that the universe is a cosmos, not a chaos, 
that amidst the mutability of all things there is no capricious- 
ness, no disorder; that in the interpretation of nature, however 
entangled or obscure the phenomena may be, we shall never be 
put to intellectual confusion. 

Now, if instead of investigating the normal phenomena of 
the world in which we live, science had first grappled with 
supernormal phenomena, it would not have reached so soon 
its present assured belief in a reign of law. We believe that 
fuller knowledge of the obscure phenomena we are investigat- 
ing will in time come to us, as it has in other branches of science, 
but the appearances are so elusive, the causes so complex, 
the result of the work sometimes so disheartening, that we 
need the steadying influence of the habit of thought engen- 
dered by science to enable us patiently and hopefully to pursue 
our way. 

Possibly historical research among the most ancient records 
may give us fragments of unsuspected information; for it is 
very probable that many, if not all, the psychical phenomena we 
are now investigating were known, and the knowledge jealously 
guarded, in ages long past. The very high civilization which 
is now known to have existed thousands of years before Christ 
in the earliest Egyptian dynasties makes it almost inconceiv- 
able to imagine that subjects of such transcendent interest to 
mankind were not then part of the learning of the few, part 
of "the wisdom of Egypt." The seizure of this knowledge by 
the priestly caste and its restriction to themselves, with pen- 
alties to all intruders, were the natural sequence of the lower 
civilization that followed. Thus psychical phenomena became 
veiled in mystery, and ultimately degraded to a mischievous 
superstition. Mystic rites were added to impress the multi- 
tude; finally divination, enchantment, augury, and necro- 
mancy became methods of wielding a mysterious power held 
by the few. But such practices "wearied the people's intellect, 
destroyed their enterprise, and distorted their conscience." ^ The 

* Prof. G. A. Smith in his brilliant and scholarly work on Isaiah, 
Vol. II., p. 199. 

XXXVI [ 19 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

industry and politics of tl^ people became paralyzed by giving 
heed to an oracle, or to Sobering spirits, rather than to reason 
and strenuous endeavor. The great Hebrew prophets, the 
statesmen of their day, saw this clearly and had the courage to 
denounce such practices in unmistakable terms; warning the 
people that by using these things as an infallible guide, or as 
a religion, they were being misled and reason was being de- 
throned from her seat. And so the burden of their speech 
was, "Thy spells and enchantments with which thou hast 
wearied thyself have led thee astray."* Hence these practices 
were prohibited, as a careful study of the whole subject shows, 
because they enervated the nation, and tended to obscure the 
Divine idea: to weaken the supreme faith in, and reverent wor- 
ship of, the one omnipotent Being the Hebrew nation was set 
apart to proclaim. With no assured knowledge of the great 
world order we now possess, these elusive occult phenomena 
confused both the intellectual and moral sense, and so they 
were wisely thrust aside. But the danger at the present day 
is very different. Instead of a universe peopled with unseen 
personalities, the science of to-day has gone to the other ex- 
treme, and, as IMr. Myers once eloquently said, we are now 
taught to believe "the universe to be a soulless interaction of 
atoms, and hfe a paltry misery closed in the grave." Were the 
Hebrew prophets now among us, surely their voice would 
not be raised in condemnation of the attempts we are making 
to show that the order of nature contains an even vaster pro- 
cession of phenomena than are now embraced within the limits 
of recognized science, and that behind the appearances with 
which science deals there are more enduring and transcendent 
realities. 

I have ventured upon this digression in the hope that I may 
remove the misgivings with which a part of our work is re- 
garded by some leaders of religious opinion, who from time 
to time have been in communication with me. Perhaps I may 
also add that the aversion which some feel toward any inquiry 

' Cf. latter half of Isaiah, ch. xlvii. 
XXXVI [ 20 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

into spiritualistic phenomena arises, I think, from a misappre- 
hension. With what is spiritual, with religion, these phenom- 
ena have nothing in common. They may afford us a rational 
belief in the existence of life without a visible body, of thought 
without material protoplasm, and so become the handmaid of 
faith. But they belong to a wholly different order from that of 
religious faith. Our concern is solely with the evidence for 
certain phenomena; and as Prof. Karl Pearson has said, 
"Whenever there is the slightest possibility for the mind of 
men to know, there is a legitimate problem for science." Hence 
all appearances, whether of microbes or of men, are legitimate 
subjects of investigation. Because they happen to be fitful, 
or phenomena occurring in an unseen environment, does not 
render the investigation improper or unscientific, though it 
makes it considerably more difficult. 

Now^ the investigations we have published undeniably estab- 
lish the fact that human personality embraces a far larger scope 
than science has hitherto recognized. That it partakes of a two- 
fold life, on one side a self-consciousness which is awakened by 
and related to time and space, to sense and outward things; on 
the other side a deeper, slumbering, but potential consciousness, 
the record of every unheeded past impression, possessing higher 
receptive and perceptive powers than our normal self-con- 
sciousness, a self that, I believe, links our individual life to the 
ocean of life and to the Source of all life. It is a remarkable 
fact that long ago the philosopher Kant instinctively stated 
the same truth. He says: "[It is possible that] the human 
soul even in this Hfe stands in indissoluble community with all 
immaterial natures of the spirit world, it mutually acts upon 
them and receives from them impressions, of which, however, 
as man, it is unconscious as long as all goes well."^ This, of 

* "Es wird kiinftig, ich weiss nicht wo oder wann, noch bewiesen 
werden, dass die menschliche Seele auch in diesem Leben in einer 
unaufloslich verkniipften Gemeinschaft mit alien immateriellen 
Naturen der Geisterwelt stehe, dass sie wechselweise in diese wirke und 
von ihnen Eindritcke empfange, deren sie sich als Mensch nicht be- 
wusst ist, so lange alles wohl steht." (Kant's Sdmmtliche Werke, 
Hartenstein's Edition, 1867, Vol. II., p. 341- 
XXXVI [ 21 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

course, was Swcdcnborg's view. He tells us, "Man is so 
constituted that he is at mc same time in the spiritual world 
and in the natural world." Plotinus, who lived in the third 
century, held a similar belief; this was in fact the view of the 
Necv-Platonists and of the later mystics generally.* In con- 
nection with this subject may I commend to you the perusal of 
Dr. Du Prcl's " Philosophy of Mysticism," which has been trans- 
lated with loving labor by one of the earliest and best friends 
of our Society, Mr. C. C. Massey; perhaps the most valuable 
part of the work being the suggestive introduction which Mr. 
Massey himself has added.^ 

There is one interesting point in connection with spiritualis- 
tic phenomena which is worth a little attention. As we are all 
aware, the production of these phenomena appears to be in- 
separably connected with some special person whom we call 
"mediumistic." This fact affords perennial amusement to the 
man in the street. But from a purely scientific standpoint there 
is nothing remarkable in this. Recent discoveries have re- 
vealed the fact that a comparatively few substances possess 
what is called radio-active power. Unlike ordinary forms of 
matter, these radio-active bodies possess an inherent and 
peculiar structure of their own. There is therefore nothing 
absurd in supposing that there may be a comparatively few per- 
sons who have a peculiar and remarkable mental structure, 
differing from the rest of mankind. Moreover, the pathologist 
or alienist docs not refuse to investigate epilepsy or monomania 
because restricted to a limited numloer of human beings. 

Furthermore, physical science gives us abundant analogies of 
the necessity of some intermediary between the unseen and the 

> Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, Vol. I., contains an excellent 
summary of the views of the Neo-Platonists. Philo Judasus, writing 
from Alexandria a few years b. c, says: "This alliance with an upper 
world, of which we are conscious, would be impossible, were not the 
soul of man an indivisible portion of the divine and blessed spirit." 
See also Thomas Taylor's translation of some of the works of Plotinus. 

* Here perhaps I may add one line expressive of my own indebted- 
ness to and affectionate regard for my dear friend C. C. Massey, whose 
knowledge of all that relates to the higher problems before our Society 
is more profound than that of any one I know. 

XXXVI [ 22 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

seen. Waves in the luminiferous ether require a material 
medium to absorb them before they can be perceived by our 
senses. The intermediary may be a photographic plate, a 
fluorescent screen, the retina, a black surface, or an electric 
resonator, according to the length of those waves. But some 
medium formed of ponderable matter is absolutely necessary 
to render the actinic, luminous, thermal, or electrical effects of 
these waves perceptible to our senses. And the more or less 
perfect rendering of the invisible waves depends on the more 
or less perfect synchronism between the unseen motions of the 
ether and the response of the material medium that absorbs and 
manifests them. 

Thus we find certain definite physical media are necessary 
to enable operations to become perceptible which otherwise 
remain imperceptible. Through these media energy traversing 
the unseen is thereby arrested, and, passing through ponderable 
matter, is able to affect our senses and arouse consciousness. 

Now, the nexus between the seen and the unseen may be 
physical or psychical, but it is always a specialized substance, 
or living organism. In some cases the receiver is a body in 
a state of unstable equilibrium, a sensitive material — like one 
of Sir Oliver Lodge's receivers for wireless telegraphy — and in 
that case its behavior and idiosyncrasies need to be studied 
beforehand. It is doubtless a peculiar psychical state, of the 
nature of which we know nothing, that enables certain persons 
whom we call mediums to act as receivers, or resonators, 
through which an unseen intelligence can manifest itself to us. 
And this receptive state is probably a sensitive condition easily 
affected by its mental environment. 

We should not go to a photographer who took no trouble to 
protect his plates from careless exposure before putting them 
in the camera. And I do not know why we should expect any- 
thing but a confused result from a so-called medium (or auto- 
matist, as Myers suggested they should be called) if the mental 
state of those present reacts unfavorably upon the sensitive. 
Inhnite patience and laborious care in observation we must 
have (as in all difficult investigation), but what good results 
from any scientific research could we expect, if we started with 
XXXVI [ 23 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

the presumption that there was nothing to investigate but 
imposture ? ^ 

In connection with this subject of mediumship, it seems to 
me very probable that a medium, an intermediary of some sort, 
is not only required on our side in the seen, but is also required 
on the other side in the unseen. In all communication of 
thought from one person to another a double translation is 
necessary. Thought, in some inscrutable way, acts upon the 
medium of our brain, and becomes expressed in written or 
spoken words. These words, after passing through space, have 
again to be translated back to thought through the medium of 
another brain. That is to say, there is a descent from thought 
to gross matter on one side, a transmission through space, and 
an ascent from gross matter to thought on the other side Now 
the so-called medium, or automatist, acts as our brain, trans- 
lating for us the impressions made upon it and which it receives 
across space from the unseen. But there must be a corre- 
sponding descent of thought on the other side to such a tele- 
pathic form that it can act upon the material particles of the 
brain of our medium. It may be even more difficult to find a 
spirit medium there than here. No doubt wisely so, for the 
invasion of our consciousness here might otherwise be so fre- 
quent and troublesome as to paralyze the conduct of our life. 
It is possible, therefore, that much of the difficulty and con- 
fusion of the manifestations which are recorded in our Pro- 
ceedings, and in the very valuable contribution which Mr. 
Piddington has just given us of sittings with Mrs. Thompson, 
are due to inevitable difficulties in translation on both sides.^ 

1 Miss Jane Barlow, who has made a close study of these com- 
munications, writes to me on this point: "The almost unimaginable 
difficulty in communicating may account for many of the failures, 
mistakes, and absurdities we notice. I think we are apt to lay too 
much stress on the want of memory. Apart from purely evidential 
considerations, there seems a tendency to regard it as a larger and 
more essential element of Personality than it really is. In my own 
case for instance, any trivial cause — a headache, a cold, or a little 
flurry — scatters my memory for proper names. I can easily imagine 
myself forgetting my own name without suffering from any serious con- 
fusion of intellect in other respects, or the least decay of personality." 
XXXVI [ 24 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

Furthermore, if my view be correct, that the self-conscious 
part of our personaUty plays but a subordinate part in any 
telepathic transmission, whether from incarnate or discarnate 
minds, we shall realize how enormously complex the problem 
becomes. So that the real persons whom we knew on earth 
may find the difficulty of self-manifestation too great to over- 
come, and only a fitful fragment of their thoughts can thus 

reach us. 

There is, however, another view of the matter which to me 
seems very probable. The transition from this hfe to the next 
may in some respects resemble our ordinary awakening from 
sleep. The discarnate soul not improbably regards the circum- 
stances of his past hfe, "in this dream world of ours," as we 
now regard a dream upon awakening. If, even immediately 
upon awakening, we try to recall all the incidents of a more or 
less vivid dream, we find how difficult it is to do so, how frag- 
mentary the whole appears; and yet in some way we are con- 
scious the dream was a far more coherent and real thing than 
we can express in our waking moments. Is it not a frequent 
and provoking experience that while some trivial features 
recur to us, the dream as a whole is elusive, and as time passes 
on even the most vivid dream is gone beyond recall? May 
it not be that something analogous to this awaits us when we 
find ourselves amid the transcendent realities of the unseen 
universe ? The deep impress of the present Hfe will doubtless 
be left on our personality, but its details may be difficult to 
bring into consciousness, and we may find them fading from us 
as we wake to the dawn of the eternal day. 

Whatever view we take, the records of these manifestations 
in our Proceedings give us the impression of a truncated per- 
sonality, "the dwindling remnant of a hfe," rather than of a 
fuller, larger hfe. Hence, while in my opinion psychical 
research does show us that intelligence can exist in the unseen, 
and personality can survive the shock of death, we must not 
confuse mere, and perhaps temporary, survival after death with 
that higher and more expanded hfe which we desire and mean 
by immortality, and the attainment of which, whatever may be 
our creed, is only to be won through the "process of the Cross." 
XXXVI [ 25 ] 



THE MYSTERIES 

For it is by self-surrendcr^lhc surrender, that is, of all that 
fetters "What we feel witl'm ourselves is highest," that we enter 
the pathway of self-realization. Or as Tennyson expresses it: 

"Thro' loss of Self 
The gain of such large life as match 'd with ours 
Were Sun to spark — unshadowable in words, 
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world." * 

'So also Goethe: 

"Und so lang du das nicht hast, 
Dieses: 'stirb und werde ' ! 
Bist du nur ein triiber Gast 
Auf der dunklen Erde.'- 



XXXVI [ 26 ] 



XXXVII 



HYPNOTISM 

"ITS HISTORY, NATURE, AND USE 

BY 

HAROLD M. HAYS, 

PHYSICIAN OF MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL 



/^F all these vague reachings toward the occult, these mys- 
terious influences oj mind on mind, no other, as Professor 
Barrett has pointed out jor us, is so definitely recognized and 
established as hypnotism. This force, weird and inexplicable 
as its action still remains, has been positively accepted within 
the domain of fact. It is medically employed in the treatment of 
disease. It begins to be matter of experiment in the inculcation 
of morality. This set of phenomena have therefore seemed to 
deserve special examination in our series, and the subject is 
presented from the pen of a man of the day and one of ourselves, 
a New York physician, in actual practice and of scholarly re- 
pute, Dr. Harold M. Hays. His discussion is reprinted by 
permission from the Popular Science Monthly, where its ap- 
pearance drew much approving comment. 

It is perhaps unnecessary to state that the word hypnotism 
brings to the mind of the average person timid recollections of 
many criminal acts. That is because few people hear of hypno- 
tism in its proper sphere. It is clothed with the garb of shame ; 
it is surrounded with all the horror belonging to the age of 
witchcraft. Newspapers delight in depicting its bad sides, in 
painting to the world the crimes that have been committed 
under its influence, the fearful results of its all-powerful spell. 
To most it means a giving up of one's will to another who is 
XXXVII [ I ] 



HYPNOTISM 

superior, the crushing of iJI's entity by the power of another, 
the total abstinence of individual self-control, the entire weak- 
ening of one's higher intelligence. Vivid imagination supplies 
the result — suffering, hardship, labor, and total subservience. 

The question arises, "Why should hypnotism have been 
thus derided ? " Simply and plainly because the ignorance of 
people in general has given it no opportunity to show its good 
sides. Unfortunately, people are always looking for the "eternal 
gullible" and are not satisfied until they get a taste of it. And, 
as hypnotism was first practised solely and is now practised 
mostly by men who have made the world their dupes, the world 
has had to suffer in the advancement of hypnotism on a scientific 
basis. But it has been so with other sciences. Astrology and 
alchemy are now things of the past ; but astronomy and chemis- 
try are their results — two great and everlasting sciences. There 
is, therefore, still great hope for hypnotism ; for, although known 
under different names for so many hundreds of years, it is still 
in its infancy and the scientific aspect of the subject is yet in 
embryo. 

Before, however, proceeding to cases in point, we may 
review briefly the history of hypnotism up to the present day. 
Call it what we may, since the beginning of the world, before 
Noah ever went on the Ark or the whale swallowed Jonah 
(much to the discomfort of both), hypnotism has been practised. 
The influence of one man over another by a certain innate 
quality or by personal magnetism has always been. Even 
Eve exerted an influence over Adam which has precipitated the 
world into misery and kept it there ever since. As time went on, 
people recognized this influence, gave it a name and called it 
the influence of the gods, the result being that those who were 
ordained with this wonderful power were called God's min- 
isters. Soothsayers, divine healers, the oracle ministers, all 
made the Oriental people construe this power by religious means. 
Among the Chaldeans, Babylonians, Persians, Hindoos, and 
other ancient peoples, there were priests who, because of their 
power of exerting a superhuman influence over others, were 
considered divine. To this day the yogis and fakirs of India 
use this power and throw themselves into a state of hynotic 
XXXVII [ 2 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

ecstasy and revcry. In the eleventh century it was used in the 
Greek Church, as it is now by the omphalopsychics. In the 
Middle Ages it was practised by Paracelsus, who maintained 
that the human body possessed a double magnetism, the first 
magnetism coming from the planets, the second from flesh and 
blood. All through the Middle Ages hypnotism was practised 
under different names, such as witchcraft, divinations, etc. It 
was supposed to be a supernatural power derived from Satan 
himself, and, therefore, the user of this power was expelled from 
society and sometimes put to death. Magic spells where 
people went into trances or out of their head were of common 
occurrence. Religious ecstasy, demon-possession, cures by 
shrines and relics, the cure by the king's touch, etc., were all 
phenomena of this same sort. 

During the seventeenth century a number of faith healers 
sprang up all over the Continent and British Isles. Many 
of these men were noted for their skill, but the one who attained 
the greatest reputation was one by the name of Greatrakes, who 
was born in Ireland about 1628. This "healer" was sent for 
by a Lord Conway, who expressed his message in tl.e following 
language: "to cure that excellent lady of his, the pains of whose 
head, as great and unparalleled as they are, have not made 
her more known or admired abroad thnn have her other en- 
dowments." At Lady Conway's was a miscellaneous gather- 
ing, chiefly engaged in mystical pursuits, "an unofficial but 
active society for psychical research, as that study existed in 
the seventeenth century." Says Mr. Lang: Greatrakes' special 
genius in these mystical pursuits was of divine agency; for he 
tells us that at one time "he heard a voyce within him (audible 
to none else), encouraging to the tryals: and afterwards to cor- 
rect his unbelief the voice aforesaid added this sign, that his 
right hand should he dead, and that the stro akin g 0} his left arm 
should recover it again, the events whereof were fully verified 
by him three nights together by a successive infirmity and cure 
of his arm." We are told that he failed to cure the lady's 
malady, but that he worked some wonderful miracles of heahng 
among the sick of the neighborhood. 

Henry Stubbe, a physician of Stratford-on-Avon, thus 
XXXVII [ 3 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

comments on Grcatrakc^^iiraclcs. He says "that God had 
bestowed upon Mr. Greatrakes a peculiar temperament, etc., 
composed his body of some particular ferments, the effluvia 
whereof, being sometimes introduced by a light, sometimes 
by a violent friction, should restore the temperament of the 
debilitated parts, reinvigorate the blood and dissipate all 
heterogeneous ferments out of the bodies of the diseased, by 
the eyes, nose, mouth, hands, and feet." Indeed, he recognized 
the difference between functional and organic complaints; and 
he only meddled with such diseases as " have their essence either 
in the masse of blood and spirit (or nervous liquors) or the 
particular temperament of the part of the body" and attempted 
to cure no disease " wherein there is a decay of nature. " "This 
is a confessed truth by him, he refusing still to touch the eyes of 
such as their sight has quite perished." None the less his cures 
were regarded as miraculous, and Dr. Stubbe tells us that "as 
there is but one Mr. Greatrakes, so there is but one Sonne"; 
Greatrakes' method consisted principally in stroaking and 
passings and in driving the pains from one point to another 
until they went out at the fingers or toes. 

In the latter half of the eighteenth century many fakirs, 
alleged philosophers, quacks, and cosmongerers came to the 
front. Swedenborg, with his inspirations; Cagliostro, with his 
idea of personal power; Schrepfcr, with the beginning of spirit- 
ualism ; and then Gassner, the priest healer, who gave to Mesmer 
later on some of the ideas for the foundation of his theories. 

Johann Joseph Gassner, a Swabian priest, appeared upon 
the scene in 1773. He was a forerunner of our modern spirit- 
ualist in a way, but had the added distinction of attributing 
all diseases to the devil. So his object was to pray for the 
expulsion of this satanic being. The patient had to have 
implicit faith and was made to give a detailed account of his 
malady. Gassner's next procedure was to chant various 
symptoms such as pain, weakness, stiffness, etc., and at his 
peremptory command to "stop," these symptoms would disap- 
pear and the patient be well again. At the words "You will 
cease being disabled," the patient's symptoms vanished. "Your 
right hand and arm will become somewhat weak," he says; 
xxxvu [ 4 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

and no sooner are the words out his mouth than the right hand 
is cold and numb and the pulse is accelerated. " Your left hand 
will become as your right one was and this one will be normal," 
is his next invocation, whereupon the left hand is cold and 
numb and the right returns to normal. Gassner keeps up these 
incantations until the patient is entirely cured, each prayer being 
accompanied by the invocation that " this is accomplished in the 
name of the Lord, Our Father." Gassner's cures in theory and 
practice were identical with those of Greatrakes, except that 
the mystery was now clothed in a religious garb. In both, the 
predominant idea was the suggestion to the patient that he 
would get well. 

The reason why hypnotism was not studied scientifically 
until the middle of the eighteenth century was that there was 
too much of an air of mystery surrounding the workings of the 
phenomena. Whenever hypnotic power was discovered in a 
person, he at once considered himself as one who possessed 
attributes which placed him above the plane of society. Sug- 
gestion was of course practised as it always has been, but the 
true idea of what the power consisted of was unknown. At 
last, toward the close of the century, Frederick Anton Mesmer 
rose before the world as a disciple of a new force which was 
destined to turn the scale on to the side of science and forever 
after to present hypnotism in a new light. 

Frederick Anton Mesmer was born at Weil, near the point 
at which the Rhine leaves the Lake of Constance, on May 23, 
1733. He studied medicine at Vienna under eminent masters, 
although at first his parents had destined him for the church. 
Interested in astrology, he imagined that the stars exerted an 
influence on beings living on the earth. He identified the 
supposed force first with electricity and then with magnetism; 
and it was but a short step to suppose that stroking diseased 
bodies with magnets might effect a cure. In 1776, meeting 
Gassner in Switzerland, he observed that the priest effected 
cures without the use of magnets, but by manipulation alone. 
This led Mesmer to discard the magnets, and to suppose that 
some kind of occult force resided in himself by which he could 
influence others. Mesmer's first practical work with magnets 
xxxvn [ 5 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

was in 1779, when he n^i^nctizcd a young lady complaining 
of various functional disorders. This emotional young lady 
" felt internally a painful streaming of a very line substance, nov/ 
here, now there, but finally settling in the lower part of her body 
and freeing her from all further attacks for six hours. " She 
was extremely sensitive to any of Mesmer's suggestions, but 
would obey no one but him. Thus we see the primeval work- 
ings of animal magnetism, afterward called hypnotism. 

Mesmer removed to Paris in 1778, and in a short time the 
French capital was thrown into a state of great excitement by 
the marvellous effects of what he called mesmerism. Mesmer 
soon made many converts; controversies arose; he excited the 
indignation of the medical faculty of Paris, who stigmatized 
him as a charlatan; still the people crowded to him. 

While at Paris his practice became so enormous that it was 
impossible for him to handle all his patients. So he invented 
a scheme by which a number of his patients could be magnetized 
at once. He had troughs filled with bottles of water and iron 
filings, around which the patients stood holding iron rods which 
issued from the troughs. All the subjects were tied to each 
other by cords so that they could not break away and thus spoil 
the contact. Perfect silence was necessary and soft music was 
heard. The patients were affected variously, according to the 
suggestion Mesmer gave them. Some became hysterical, 
others crazed, some became affectionate and embraced each 
other, while others laughed and became repulsive. This lasted 
for hours and was followed by states of dreaminess and languor. 
A picture given by Binet and Feret, two eminent French scien- 
tists, will present an idea of these meetings. 

" Mesmer, wearing a coat of lilac silk, walked up and down 
amid this agitated throng accompanied by Deslon and his 
associates whom he chose for their youth and comeliness. 
Mesmer carried a long iron wand, with which he touched the 
bodies of the patients and especially the diseased parts. Often 
laying aside the wand, he magnetized the patients with his eyes, 
fixing his gaze on theirs, or applying his hand to the hypochon- 
driac region and to the abdomen. This application was often 
applied for hours, and at other times the master made use of 
XXXVII [ 6 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

passes. He began by placing himself ' en rapport ' with his sub- 
ject. Seated opposite to him, foot against foot, knee against 
knee, Mesmer laid his fingers on the hypochondriac region and 
moved them to and fro, lightly touching the ribs. Magnetism 
with strong electric currents was substituted for these manipula- 
tions when more energetic results were to be produced. The 
master, raising his fingers in a pyramidal form, passed his hands 
all over the patient's body, beginning with the head and going 
downward over the shoulders to the feet. He then returned to 
the head, both back and front, to the belly and the back, and 
renewed the process again and again until the magnetized per- 
son was saturated with the healing fluid and transported with 
pain or pleasure, both sensations being equally salutary. Young 
women were so much gratified by the crisis that they wished to 
be thrown into it anew. They followed Mesmer through the 
halls and confessed that it was impossible not to be warmly 
attached to the person of the magnetizer." 

Mesmer was not an impostor by any means. He had deceived 
himself and had thus deceived others. But the Academy 
of Sciences in Paris believed that he was a mystic and a fanatic, 
and made it so hot for him that he was finally forced to leave 
France, where, however, he returned later. He died in 1815, 
and for a time animal magnetism fell into disrepute and Mesmer 
was denounced as an impostor. 

Before Mesmer's death, he moved from Paris to a secluded 
spot among the hills. We see him at the last — bitterly com- 
plaining of the treatment he had received, thoroughly convinced 
as to the truth of his pet theories, performing various cures for 
the peasants about him, and living the simple life of a hermit. 

Throughout Mesmer's career, the streets were not paved 
with gold. Many people died under his treatment, giving the 
belief that the treatment itself was the cause of death. He was 
treated with ridicule wherever he went. Papers, plays, etc., 
brought him even more prominently before the public in a more 
ridiculous light than his own hypothetical and mystical per- 
formances. A comedy, "Docteur Moderncs" brought his 
procedures on the stage. It severely criticised his "fanatical" 
enthusiasm for a quondam science and portrayed the supposed 
XXXVII [ 7 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

abuses of his treatment, ^i England notices like the following 
appeared in the leading journals : 

"The Wonderful Magnetical Elixir. Take of the chemical 
oil of Fear, Dread, and Terror, each 4 oz. ; of the Rectified 
Spirits of Imagination, 2 lbs. Put all these ingredients into 
a bottle of fancy, digest for several days, and take forty drops 
at about nine in the morning, or a few minutes before you re- 
ceive a portion of the magnetic Effluvia. They will make the 
effluvia have a surprising effect, etc., etc." 

Once, in 1785, a mock funeral oration upon Mesmer took 
place, making his exhibitions and theories seem more ridiculous 
than ever. Thus he was tossed about between ridicule and 
praise until, as we have seen, his life was hardly one of harmony 
or joy. 

Braid. 

Although a number of men followed Mesmer, appropriating 
his method, enlarging upon it and changing it somewhat — 
such men as de Puysegur — it will be impossible in such a brief 
essay to tell of all of them. However, there is one man who 
rose up in the chaos of the times and again added new facts and 
theories to the science. This man was Braid, a surgeon of Man- 
chester, England. Braid was born in the year 1795 on his 
father's estate in Fifcshire. He received his education at the 
University of Edinburgh, later being apprenticed to Dr. Chas. 
Anderson, of Leith. After graduating, he was appointed 
surgeon to the Hopetown mining works in Lanarkshire, later 
moving to Dumfries, where he engaged in practice with a 
Dr. Maxwell. An accident happening at that time brought 
to his town a Mr. Petty, who finally persuaded him to move to 
Manchester. It was here that he carefully worked on his 
new discovery and practised his cures. He died on March 25, 
i860. 

There is very little in Braid's life of especial interest, except 
his investigations in animal magnetism. His life seems to have 
been particularly free from the early struggles of a young 
practitioner. His interest in animal magnetism dates from 
the time he witnessed a seance by a M. Lafontaine, a travelhng 
XXXVII [ 8 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

mesmerist. He was extremely skeptical, but this one urged 
him to try experimenting himself. 

In 1866 this M. Ch. Lafontaine, a travelling mesmerist, 
published his "Memoirs of a Magnetizer." If it had not been 
for this, the electro-biologists of America, under one named 
Grimes, might have claimed prior right to the discovery of hypno- 
tism. M. Lafontaine thus describes the state of affairs at that 
time: 

"Having accomplished the cure of numerous deaf and 
blind persons," says he with modest assurance, "as also nu- 
merous epileptic and paralytic sufferers at the hospital (this 
was in Birmingham), I repaired to Liverpool, but only to meet 
with disappointment; few persons attended the seance; and on 
the following day I proceeded to Manchester, in which city 
my success was conspicuous. The newspapers reported my 
experiments at great length, and to give some idea of the sensa- 
tion I created I may say that my seances returned me a gross 
total of 30,000 f ranees. I put to sleep a number of persons who 
were well-known residents of Manchester. I caused deaf 
mutes to hear, operated a number of brilliant cures. After my 
departure, Dr. Braid, a surgeon in Manchester, delivered a 
lecture in which he proposed to prove that magnetism was 
non-existent. From this lecture Braidism, ajterwards called 
hypnotism, originated, ardent discussions arising, even from the 
beginning, over this pretended discovery. I received letters 
from Manchester entreating me to return, and I did so on 
a date when Dr. Braid had announced a demonstration. His 
experiments were given, but unfortunately on this occasion none 
of them succeeded; neither sleep nor catalepsy was obtained, 
and every moment I was appealed to. In the facts that were 
advanced on this occasion by Dr. Braid, there was in my opinion 
absolutely nothing that was remarkable, and had not that 
gentleman been honorably known in the town I should have 
supposed that he was mystifying his audience. The next day, 
and for six days consecutively, I experimented after his own 
fashion on fifty or sixty subjects and the results were practically 
nil. I then gave a magnetic seance and the results on Eugene 
and Mary were marked and positive." 
XXXVII [ 9 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

The value of the quo^iion rests solely on the opportune 
remark that Braid was the first to apjily the name liypnotism 
to animal magnetism. One should not forget that Eugene and 
Mary were two subjects whom Lafontaine carried with him 
from town to town and on whom he could rely for phenomena. 

Though Braid survived his discovery by not more than 
eighteen years, he lived to know that it was well on the road 
to acceptance by the competent opinion of the time. In the 
latter part of his life he said: "I feel no anxiety for the fate of 
hypnotism, provided it only has 'a fair field and no favor.' I 
am content to bide my time, in the firm conviction that truth, for 
which alone I most earnestly strive, with the discovery of the 
safest, and surest, and speediest modes of relieving human 
suffering, will ultimately triumph over error" ("Magic, Witch," 

P- 53)- 

The enemies of Braid were as vociferous in their denuncia- 
tion of him as his friends were earnest in their praise. And 
what may seem the greatest surprise and yet what seems to be 
a natural consequence of opposition, the Mesmerists themselves 
were the ones who were the loudest in opposing him. However, 
his method has stood the test of years and still prevails among 
those who practise the art nowadays. 

As was said before, the first exhibition that Braid ever 
attended was one given by this same Lafontaine. One fact, 
the inability of the patient to open his eyelids, arrested his atten- 
tion. He considered this a real phenomenon and was anxious 
to discover the physiological cause of it. 

"In two days afterward," he says, "I developed my views 
to my friend Captain Brown, as I had previously clone to four 
other friends; and in his presence and that of my family and 
another friend, the same evening, I instituted a series of ex- 
periments to prove the correctness of my theory — namely that 
the continued fixed stare, by paralyzing nervous centres in the 
eyes and their appendages and destroying the equilibrium of 
the nervous system, thus proved the phenomenon referred to. 
The experiments were varied so as to convince all present that 
they fully bore out the correctness of my theoretical views. 
My first object was to prove that the inability of the patient to 
XXXVII [ lo ] 



HYPNOTISM 

open his eyes was caused by paralyzing the upper muscles of the 
eyes, through their continued action during the protracted 
fixed stare, and thus rendering it physically impossible for him 
to open them. With the view of proving this, I requested Mr. 
Walker, a young gentlemen present, to sit down, and maintain 
a fixed stare at the top of a wine bottle, placed so much above 
him as to produce a considerable strain on the eyes and eyelids, 
to enable him to maintain a steady view of the object. In three 
minutes his eyelids closed, a gush of tears ran down his cheeks, 
his head drooped, his face was slightly convulsed, he gave a 
groan and instantly fell into a profound sleep, the respiration 
becoming slow, deep, and sibilant, the right hand and arm being 
agitated by slight convulsive movements. At the end of four 
minutes, I considered it necessary, for his safety, to put an end 
to the experiment." 

Braid became so convinced that his interpretation of the 
phenomena was the correct one that he used it universally, 
succeeding in a remarkable number of cases. His method 
was as follows: 

He would take any bright object, most often his lancet case, 
and, holding it about fifteen inches from the eyes, and in such a 
position as to strain them and still allow tlie patient to gaze stead- 
ily at it, he would carry it slowly toward them until the eyelids 
closed involuntarily. After a preliminary contraction of the 
pupils, they would dilate, and finally a tremulous motion of the 
iris would take place. If this did not succeed after a few 
minutes, he would try again, letting the patient understand 
that his eyes and mind had to be riveted on the one idea of the 
object before him. The primary fact was the fixation of the 
mind on a certain object. Nay, even the hypnotist himself, if 
he use the method of attraction, may be hypnotized, as Braid 
shows in the following example. Mr. Walker, Braid's friend, 
offered to hypnotize a certain person. When Braid went into 
the room where the experiment was going on he saw the gen- 
tleman sitting staring at Mr. Walker's finger. Mr. Walker 
was standing a little to the right of his patient with his eyes 
fixed steadily on those of the latter. Braid passed on, and 
when he returned he found Mr. Walker standing in the same 
xxxvn [ 1 1 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

position fast asleep, his arn^nd finger perfectly rigid and the 
patient wide awake, starin^it the finger all the while. 

After Braid, many men pursued the scientific investigation 
of the phenomena. The interest in the new science since 1875 
has spread quickly over Europe. In Belgium, the eminent 
psychologist Delboeuf of Liege made a path for it. In Holland 
such men as Van Reuterghem, Van Eiden, and De Jong used 
hypnotism for curative purposes; in Denmark, Norway, and 
Sweden there were Johannessen, Sell, Frankel, Calsen, and 
Wetterstrand, of Stockholm, and finally Swedenborg. In 
Russia were Strembo and Tokarski; in Greece, Italy, and Spain 
hypnotism has greatly come into play in medical treatment. 
In England Carpenter, Laydock, Sir James Simpson, Lloyd- 
Tuckey, Mayo, and others have used it for curing the sick. In 
America the science also has its advocates. It is one of the 
subjects constantly appearing before the Society for Psychical 
Research. In South America it numbers among its adherents 
David Benavente and Octavio Maria, of Chili. The interest 
in hypnotism in France centred around two schools, the 
school of Salpetriere and the school of Nancy. The former 
was led by Charcot, whose luminous researches in this subject 
are epoch-making. 

The Paris school held that hypnotism is the result of an 
abnormal or diseased condition of the nervous system; that 
suggestion is not at all necessary to produce the phenomena; 
that hysterical subjects are the most easily influenced ; and that 
the whole subject is explainable on the basis of cerebral anatomy 
and physiology. But lately the followers of Charcot, who 
had been numerous in the beginning because he was so highly 
reliable a man, have begun to dwindle away and have turned 
to the school of Nancy. The reason for this is obvious to any 
one who has studied hypnotic phenomena. The first objection 
to the school of Salpetriere is that most of the experiments 
have been made on hysterical women. In the second place, 
this school ignores suggestion, which has been found to be one 
of the most important factors in hypnotism. They appreciate 
of course that it can be used, but assert that it is not necessary. 

The school of Nancy, led by Bernheim, met with equal 
XXXVII [12] 



HYPNOTISM 

success and is now upheld by more people than the other school. 
The theory of the school of Nancy may be summed up in a few 
words : first, the different psychological conditions in the hypnotic 
state are determined by mental action; secondly, people of good 
sound physical health and of perfect mental balance can pro- 
duce the best results; and thirdly, all the mental and physical 
actions are the results of suggestion. In fact suggestion is the 
all-important factor in producing the various phenomena. 

Liebault and Bernheim, his pupil, by bringing forth the 
idea of suggestion, have made themselves in a way the equal of 
Braid, for in continuation of the latter's method the method of 
the former is always used nowadays. The influence of Bern- 
heim over his patients is remarkable. His great success may 
be accounted for by the confidence his patients have in him. 
Of course the low intellectual state of the peasant class of France 
may have something to do with it, for one can hardly think that 
in any ordinary community this supreme belief and trust in 
a human being could exist. To Nancy people come from all 
over the provinces to visit this "Man of God," who performs 
experiments and cures which seem divine. Bernheim goes 
from one patient to another, shouting "Sleep I" Many of them 
having been hypnotized by him often, fall into the state im- 
mediately. When the experiments are over he goes the rounds 
of his patients, snapping his fingers, in which way he awakens 
them. 

To sum up, then, we may say the history of hypnotism may 
be divided into five epochs. The first, before the time of 
Mesmer; the second, the age of Mesmerism, when personal 
magnetism was supposed to be the attractive power; the third, 
the age of Braid, when the science was put on a physiological 
basis; the fourth, the age of Bernheim and Charcot, when the 
idea of suggestion was brought to the front and hypnotism 
was used indiscriminately; and lastly, the fifth, the age we are 
in now, where the tendency is to restrict hypnotism and to 
classify it for specific uses. 



XXXVII [ 13 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

The NATii^i of Hypnotism. 

Each individual has a separate state of consciousness which 
changes as do the thoughts therein. It is in the waking state 
that we have separate individuahties. Now let us see the 
gradations of this consciousness. At this present moment we 
shall say we are listening intently to a sermon. That is the 
thing uppermost in our minds, and as long as our minds are 
upon it we are exercising acute consciousness. But, even if our 
attention to this sermon is the central thing, in the fringe of 
our mental picture a number of other thoughts are jumping 
around, any one of which may be powerful enough to force its 
way into the middle of the picture and to usurp its place. For 
example, all the while we are listening to this sermon we are 
more or less conscious that the seats we are in are hard, that 
somebody is talking next to us, etc. Our seats may become 
so uncomfortable that it may occupy our whole attention, or 
something outside may seem of more interest. If our attention 
jumps from one thing to another, this is called diffused con- 
sciousness. The next step to diffused consciousness is the 
dreamy state where the mind is half way between waking 
and sleep. Anything may come into the mind while in this 
state and be the predominant idea, to be chased out again by 
a next idea. It is for this reason that dreams usually present 
such a chaos and jumble. Our thoughts tumble over one an- 
other to get from the fringe of consciousness to the foreground. 
Any external sensation will be greatly exaggerated and may 
turn the trend of our thought. A warm bed might feel like 
the fire of hell, a heavy dinner with indigestion like the battles 
of heroes using our poor bodies as the fighting ground. As 
dreams gradually fade away we approach our first hypnosis or 
sleep, which, in the beginning, is slight, but gradually deepens, 
finally consciousness being entirely lost. 

Thus we have traced the process of natural sleep to which 
hypnotic sleep is closely akin. The person at first has a diffused 
attention, he then confines his attention to sleep, he next passes 
into a dreaming state, then into a light sleep and lastly into a 
deep sleep. 

XXXVII [ 14 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

The differences between it and natural sleep are as follows : 
first, the state ordinarily is produced by another; secondly, the 
person must have faith ; and thirdly, the phenomena in the sleep 
must be produced by suggestion. The two latter were fully 
recognized years ago and have formed the basis of all psychical 
cures ever since. How the sleep can be produced by another 
was seen in the experiments of Braid, where one appreciates 
fully that the person really hypnotizes himself by gazing at an 
object. The full understanding between hypnotized and 
hypnotist has never been really understood, and so here we are 
stopped short. 

The theory of Dr. Hudson may put us on the right track. 
Because it is so convenient a theory and tends to make plausible 
a number of things which otherwise could not be understood, 
I am going to take the liberty of detailing it here. Dr. Hudson 
claims that every normal person is possessed of two minds, 
a subjective one and an objective one. The objective mind 
is the one we use every day, a mind fully capable of forgetting 
and the only one of which we are ordinarily cognizant. The 
subjective mind is the perfect mind wherein are stored up all 
the numerous thoughts that have ever come into it, there lying 
dormant, only to be reawakened when a new set of associations 
brings them forth. 

It is this mind which we may say is used in hypnotism, in 
somnambulism, the one which shows itself in altered personality 
and in various other abnormalities. Some authors consider 
this the subliminal or subconscious mind.^ 

That there is another mind far more perfect and which brings 
to our recollection many things forgotten, seems to be an un- 
disputed fact. When a drug like Cannabis indica is used, or 
when a person is drowning, there come before his mind's eye, 
in a single moment, the doings of years. And so in some re- 
corded cases of trance states the same thing is proved. A 

' One cannot help realizing that this theory will never be fully ac- 
cepted. Most psycliologists are still quarrelling over concepts, and no 
two will agree as to what is meant by a subjective or an objective 
mind. 

XXXVII [ 15 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

highly interesting case is^ppi^cn by Mr. Coleridge in his "Bio- 
graphica Lileraria." 

Mr. Coleridge says: 

"It occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a year 
or two before my arrival at Gottingtn, and had not then ceased 
to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of 
four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, 
was seized with a nervous fever, during which, according to the 
asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, 
she became possessed, and as it appeared, by a very learned devil. 
She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, 
in very pompous tones, and with a most distinct enunciation. 
This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact 
that she was, or had been, a heretic. The case had attracted 
the particular attention of a young physician, and by his state- 
ment many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited 
the town and cross examined the case on the spot. Sheets 
full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth and 
were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible 
each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. 
Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; 
the remainder seemed to be in Rabbinical dialect. All trick 
or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young 
woman been a harmless simple creature, but she was evidently 
under a nervous fever. In the town in which she had been 
resident for many years as a servant in different families, no 
solution presented itself. The young physician, however, 
determined to trace her past life, step by step; for the patient 
herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at 
length succeeded in discovering the place where her parents 
had lived, travelled thither, found them both dead, but an uncle 
surviving, and from him learned that the patient had been 
charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, 
and had remained with him some years, even till the old man's 
death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was 
a very good man. With great difficulty and after much search, 
our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, 
who had lived with him as housekeeper and had inherited his 
XXXVII [ i6 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

efiFects. She remembered the girl ; related that her venerable 
uncle had been too indulgent, and could not hear the girl scolded ; 
that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her parents' 
death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were 
then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the 
solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it ap- 
peared that it had been the old man's custom for years to walk 
up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen 
door opened, and to read to himself, with a loud voice, out of 
his favorite books. A considerable number of these were still 
in the niece's possession. She added that he was a very learned 
man and a great Hebraist. Among the books was found a 
collection of Rabbinical writings, together with several of the 
Greek and Latin fathers; and the physician succeeded in 
identifying so many passages with those taken down at the 
young woman's bedside that no doubt could remain in any 
rational mind concerning the true origin of the impression made 
on her nervous system." 

The same power of the subjective mind is many times 
seen in hypnotic phenomena. The case cited is but one of a 
number, all of which are just as wonderful. Being a mind so 
perfectly endowed, it is hardly too audacious to say that this 
mind exercises its influence over all bodily functions, so that any 
function may be inhibited or accelerated by its influence. For 
example, the following is related of Henry Clay. 

"On one occasion he was unexpectedly called upon to 
answer an opponent who addressed the Senate on a question 
in which Clay was deeply interested. The latter felt too ill 
to reply at length. It seemed imperative, however, that he 
should say something; and he exacted a promise from a friend 
who sat behind him that he would stop him at the end of ten 
minutes. Accordingly, at the expiration of the prescribed time 
the friend gently pulled the skirts of Mr. Clay's coat. No 
attention was paid to the hint, and after a brief time it was 
repeated a little more imperatively. Still Clay paid no attention 
and it was again repeated. Then a pin was brought into re- 
quisition; but Clay was by that time thoroughly aroused, and 
was pouring forth a torrent of eloquence. The pin was inserted 
XXXVII [ 17 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

deeper and deeper into t^T orator's leg without eliciting any 
response, until his friend gave up in despair. Finally Mr. 
Clay happened to glance at the clock and saw that he had been 
speaking two hours ; whereupon he fell into his friend 's arms, 
completely overcome by exhaustion, upbraiding his friend 
severely for not stopping him at the prescribed time. 

The fact that Mr. Clay, on that occasion, made one of the 
ablest specclies of his life, two hours in length, at a time when 
he felt almost too ill to rise to his feet, and that his body was at 
the time in a condition of perfect ancesthesia, is a splendid illus- 
tration of the synchronous action of the two minds, and also 
of the perfect control exercised by the subjective mind over 
the functions and sensations of the body ("Lav/ of Psychic 
Phenomena"). 

I now propose to attempt to explain some of the phenomena 
of hypnotism by reviewing thoroughly a specific example. 

On November 23, 1901, 1 was asked by a young lady to try to 
cure her of biting her fingernails. She was then about eighteen 
years of age. I immediately replied that I should be glad to 
do so if I had her full permission. Besides her and myself, 
there were four or five other persons in the room, including 
her father and mother. Getting her perfectly composed, I 
placed my hand on the top of her head, and told her to turn 
her eyes in the direction of the hand. This tired her eyes 
very readily. They became heavier, the eyelids twitched and 
inside of five minutes they fell and she was sound asleep. 
I first placed her in a cataleptic condition. I told her her arm 
was a piece of stone and therefore could not be bent. Two or 
three of those assembled tried to bend it, but failed. Then by 
more suggestions I placed her in an ancesthetic condition and 
rubbed the ball of her eye. She neither winked nor flinched. 
I then gave her a few post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, 
I told her that when she awakened she would go over and close 
the window, that she would then thank me for what I had done, 
and would feel no bad effects and also would remember nothing. 
Then I told her that the following Sunday I would come over, 
and, as soon as I told her to go to sleep, she would do so. When 
she awoke, she went over and closed the window, and then 
XXXVII [ 18 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

thanked mc for what I had done. She remembered nothing and 
felt much rested. Of course, suggestions were constantly given 
that she would not bite her nails. 

The following Sunday, I went over there again. She had 
not bitten her fingernails since the last time I saw her. I 
told her to lie down and that in three minutes she would be 
sound asleep. I used no method whatsoever. In fact, I was 
in another room. When the three minutes were up, I went 
in to her and found her in a deep sleep. I impressed on her a 
number of times that she would never bite her fingernails again. 
I placed her in a chair, tclhng her to open her eyes. She was 
to see or hear nobody but me. A number of people stood be- 
fore her, but she could not sec them. I asked her a question 
which she readily answered. Then somebody else asked her 
the same question, but no answer could be got from her. She 
seemed perfectly deaf to their words. I asked her if she heard 
anybody else and she answered "No. " I next procured a needle 
which was perfectly clean, and telling her she would feel no pain 
I ran it into her forearm for over half an inch. Very little blood 
appeared, as I had suggested, and she felt nothing. In fact, 
after the experiments were over she did not know anything 
about the wound. Taking a glass of water, I told her it was 
whiskey. She took a little with some show of difficulty in 
swallowing, and when I told her to walk about the room she 
reeled around as though she were overcome by the liquor. I 
then procured some salt, telling her it was sugar and that it 
would cure her of her dizziness immediately. She took the salt, 
a half teaspoonful, said it tasted sweet, asked for more, and was 
entirely herself again. Finally I placed her between two people, 
putting her head on one's lap and her feet on the other's. She 
became cataleptic on my suggestion and when two hundred and 
fifty pounds were put on her body she sustained them very 
readily. 

Before she awakened I gave her three suggestions: (i) 
That as soon as she awoke she would go into the front room and 
lie down on the sofa for a few minutes; (2) that she would go up 
to her parents and tell them that she was never going to bite 
her nails again; and (3) that two weeks from that night she 
xxxvn [ 19 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

would sit down after sup|^ and write me a letter, thanking me 
for what I had done. All these suggestions were carried into 
effect. 

On Monday, December g, two weeks and a day after the 
experiment had been made, I received the following letter : 

" Dec. 8th, 1 90 1. 
" Dear Mr. Hays: 

" I feel as though I owe you a note of thanks for the wonderful 
cure you have effected on nie. I have not bitten my nails since three 
weeks ago to-night, and lam very proud of them. I am writing this 
to try to let j'ou know how much I thank you. It seems remarkable 
that a little thing like hypnotism can do so much good, and I shall al- 
ways feel grateful and indebted to you for this. 

" Yours sincerely, 

"E." 

Not until after the letter had been sent did she find out that 
it had been I who prompted her to do it. This young lady 
has not bitten her fingernails since and is entirely cured. 

We have already found the primary cause of the sleep when 
produced by the tiring of the eyes. The eyelids droop because 
the muscles become temporarily paralyzed. There is one ad- 
vantage in placing the hand on top of the head. It is that it 
rolls the eyeballs upward, thus putting them in a natural position 
for sleep. The various other processes after the sleep has been 
produced are all dependent on the workings of the nervous 
system. Let us first try to explain the cataleptic state— how 
it is that the arm becomes so rigid that the bones can be broken 
before the arm will bend. The most plausible explanation to 
my mind is that impulses are sent from the brain which make 
one set of muscles counteract the influence of another set. For 
example, let us say that two men of equal strength are pulling 
with all their might on a thick stick. As long as the pull is the 
same on both sides, the stick won't move. How the mind can 
exert such an influence we do not know. This same idea of the 
counteraction of various muscles applies to the whole body as 
well as to one arm. Yet some one may ask how these muscles 
can have the power to stand more strain than they do in the 
waking state. It is only that as our normal selves we never use 
XXXVII [ 20 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

our full muscle power. This is because not enough stimulation 
is ever given to the muscle to make it work to its full extent. 
But in cases of great excitement or danger even the weakest 
seem to have superhuman strength. 

The loss of the sense of pain or anaesthesia can also be ac- 
counted for by the brain. When we say we have a pain in our 
finger, we don't really mean that. The cut is in the finger, but 
the pain is in the brain, and consciousness is necessary for us to 
have pain. Suppose a man is going to have an operation on 
his finger and is made unconscious. Now the finger is there, 
but the pain has disappeared, showing that pain is not located 
in various parts of the body, but in the domain of consciousness. 
So if, under hypnotic influence, you tell the patient that he will 
have no pain, he thinks the pain away, so to speak — knocks it 
out of his consciousness. 

How we can run needles into people and produce no blood 
seems still more remarkable, but physiologically it can be ex- 
plained. Let me say here that if any one should pierce a large 
artery with a needle serious consequences might result. Let 
us say that we penetrate the skin in a place where there are 
thousands of little capillaries. Each one of these vessels is 
connected with the nervous system by two sets of nerve fibres 
— those which can dilate the vessels, those which can constrict 
them. Now, suppose I give the suggestion that I am going to 
run a needle through a certain part of the arm. An impulse, 
sent from the brain, constricts the blood-vessels at this spot, 
inhibits the sense of pain, and the needle comes out again with- 
out a drop of blood following it. 

The explanation of the dizziness from water supposed to be 
whiskey and the cure by salt supposed to be sugar is that both 
are the result of an unexplainable force whereby the patient 
takes every word of the hypnotizer as gospel, though it is con- 
tradictory to his own ideas. For example, in one case a patient 
told me that he knew the glass contained water and yet it 
tasted like whiskey, and he also knew that the cellar contained 
salt and yet it tasted like sugar. 

The cure of the fingernail habit and all the post -hypnotic 
suggestions may be summed up briefly. All we should do is 
xxxvn [ 21 ] 



HYPNOTISM 



to refer back to the perfect or subjective mind, where all these 
suggestions are stored up, cind say that the objective mind draws 
nutriment from it, and in this nutriment these suggestions given 
under the hypnotic influence come into play. 

Before closing this portion of the essay I should like to say 
that I believe hypnotism is not an occult power, but is a simple, 
natural, physiological process. And again, anybody can use 
the power just as any one can become a good piano player, or 
student, or business man by training. Yet it is only those with 
the natural tendency toward personal power who will make 
the greatest success. 

It would indeed be pleasing to me to cite a number of won- 
derful cases where hypnotism has been used experimentally in 
order to show the great influence of the mind over the body — 
how a horse can be ridden over the outstretched body of a man in 
a cataleptic state, how illusions and hallucinations can be pro- 
duced, how we may even obtain negative hallucinations, how 
we can turn an adult into a child, how we can conjure before 
the mind's eye vistas grand and superb, panoramas gorgeous 
and elegant, how the commonest man may become an orator, 
a saint, an assassin perhaps. But all these things would be far 
beyond the scope of this essay. However, one case seems to be 
of especial interest, as it shows how far hypnotism may be used 
in the cure of various inflammations. 

" The experiment is on a nurse twenty-eight years old, who is 
not at all hysterical. She is a daughter of plain country people, 
and has been for a long time an attendant in the Zurich Lunatic 
Asylum, which Forel directs. He thinks her a capable, honest per- 
son, in no way inclined to deceit. The experiments were as fol- 
lows : A gummed label was fixed upon her chest on either side ; 
the paper was square. In no case was an irritating gum used. 
At midday Forel suggested that a blister had been put on the 
left side ; and at six o'clock in the evening a moist spot had ap- 
peared in that place; the skin was swollen and red around it, 
and a little inflammation also appeared on the right side, but 
much less. Forel then did away with the suggestion. On the 
next day there was a scab on the left side. Forel had not 
watched the nurse between noon and six o'clock, but had 

XXXVII • [ 22 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

suggested that she could not scratch herself. The other 
nurses said that the subject could not raise her hand to her 
chest, but made vain attempts to scratch. Forel repeated the 
experiment later; he put on the paper at 11:45 ^•^' ^^^ ^^' 
dered the formation of bhsters in two and one-half hours. 
Little pain was suggested, and the nurse therefore complained 
but little. At two o'clock Forel looked at the paper on the left 
side, for which the suggestion had been made, and saw around 
it a large swelling and reddening of the skin. The paper 
could with difficulty be removed. A moist surface of epider- 
mis was then visible, exactly square like the paper. There 
was nothing particular under the paper on the right side. 
Forel then suggested the disappearance of the pain, inflam- 
mation, etc." 

In time everything disappeared. 

Many investigators have been able to bring about a change 
in blood supply and other visceral changes of a similar kind. 
Changes in temperature have been made as much as three 
degrees centigrade. Bernheim found that by suggestion he 
could induce local reddening of the skin. This is undoubted- 
ly a vasomotor change. These local red spots were often found 
in the Middle Ages on the hands of monks and nuns after they 
had been looking steadily at a cross for hours. At that time 
it was supposed to be a miracle and a message from the Divinity. 
In i860, a woman was found with these spots or blisters caused 
by something unknown. It was learned that she got these 
while in the hypnotic state. The wounds healed in the nor- 
mal way, and all that remained to make it necessary for it to be 
commented upon was that it gave the investigators the idea of 
trying to produce these spots by artificial means. Krafft-Ebing, 
a noted German physician, produced certain results analogous to 
those cited above. He would put something in the patient's 
hand and give him the suggestion that it was burning. A red- 
dening would appear. He would take a scissors, a piece of 
metal, and a postage stamp (saying it was a mustard plaster), 
and would produce the same results. 

Wonderful as it may seem — that hypnotic suggestion can 
produce such grave organic changes — the physician has only to 
xxxvn [ 23 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

reflect for a moment on^fb powerful changes which the mind 
exerts over the course of a disease. He realizes only too well 
that the mental attitude of the patient toward his malady is 
of almost as much importance in the cure as the therapeutic 
measures he may advise. Processes of inflammation are purely 
physiological in the hght of modern medicine, and yet there can 
be no inflammatory process which cannot be made worse by 
concentrated mental worry. A sore finger to the phlegmatic 
individual is a trifle: but the hysterical woman makes a "moun- 
tain out of a mole hill" of it and thereby actually makes the 
inflammation worse. 



The Uses of Hypnotism. 

The general tendency has been in the last decade to use 
hypnotism indiscriminately; but, like every therapeutic agent, 
it in time will become restricted and used only in certain com- 
plaints. It surely should be included by every physician in 
his " therapeutic arsenal. " It has one thing in its favor which 
places it above all remedial agents, and that is that when it is 
used properly it can do no harm. We must recognize that in all 
the scientific literature on the subject there has not a single 
death been reported from its use. The unscientific application 
is its abuse. 

We must also recognize that there are many cases that 
are practically incurable by medical treatment, cases which 
defy the greatest physicians, cases which are surprising because 
of their persistency. When the last extreme has been reached, 
when physicians consult and pronounce the case as practically 
incurable, hypnotism may be tried. 

Before the advent of ether or chloroform, the possibility of 
using hypnotism for anaesthetic purposes was thought of and 
apparently its use in this direction met with success in a limited 
number of cases. In 1859, Dr. Guerineau announced that he 
had amputated a thigh under hypnotic anaesthesia. Some 
other reports are as follows: Jules Cloquent amputated a 
breast in 1845; Dr. Loysel of Cherbourg amputated a leg and 
XXXVII [ 24 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

removed some glands in 1846; a double amputation of the legs 
by Drs. Fanton and Toswel in 1845; amputation of an arm 
by Dr. Joly in 1845; and in 1847 a tumor of the jaw was re- 
moved by Drs. Ribaud and Kiaro of Poitiers — all under hypnotic 
anaesthesia (Bernheim's ''Suggestive Therapeutics"). 

But hypnotism was found to have more drawbacks than 
advantages in these cases of major surgery. In the first place, 
hypnotic anaesthesia is a difficult state to produce and even a 
more difficult state to maintain. Secondly, there is always the 
possibility of the patient awakening unexpectedly and dying 
from the shock of the operation. 

Although it has thus fallen out of use as an anaesthetic in 
these serious cases, still it is used constantly, and more and 
more every day, in minor surgery. In dentistry it certainly 
has its place; in outpatient departments of our hospitals it is 
often of value, as it has no after-effects. 

The various medical cases that have been treated by 
the hypnotic method are too numerous to recount. They in- 
clude nearly every form of mental non-equilibrium and also 
cases of general organic trouble dependent more or less on the 
mental attitude of the patient. They include habits of various 
kinds, such as onychophagie or fingernail biting, excessive 
smoking, dypsomania, nervous twitchings, etc., nervous head- 
aches, insomnia and neuralgias; chronic nervous constipation 
and diarrhoea and dyspepsia; local and general pain, insom- 
nia and neurasthenia. Nor is this all. Hypnotism's greatest 
blessing consists in the cure of psychic paralytics and psychic 
hysterics. In this connection we may say that it should be 
used unconditionally. Dr. Starr in a lecture at the College of 
Physicians and Surgeons cited a case of paralysis in the left 
arm from the shoulder to the elbow. A physician knows that 
it is impossible to get a true paralysis of this kind. Dr. Starr 
hypnotized the patient in his clinic and in less than three 
minutes the arm was in as good working order as ever. During 
the course of the past year, I have worked on a few hysterical 
cases for physicians where nothing but hypnotism could cure 
them. A remarkable case of true organic nature came to my 
notice over a year ago. A lady had a severe swelling on her 
XXXVII [ 25 ] 



HYPNOTISM 

finger which was so pai^l that I could hardly bandage it for 
her. I put her to sleep, suggested the pain away, told her the 
inflammation would subside the next day and awakened her. 
I could then do anything I wished to the finger without hurting 
her. 

I have left aside the part that hypnotism plays in mental 
and moral culture — a phase of the subject so vast that it deserves 
more consideration than could be given here, but the possibilities 
of which must suggest themselves to all. 



XXXVII f 26 ] 



XXXVIII 



THE WILL 

"ITS CULTIVATION AND POWER" 

BY 

JULES FINOT 



/^LOSE allied to hypnotism and the vast field of new thoughts, 
new possibilities, which it is opening to man, come the 
problems and possibilities of the Will. Its power may be de- 
veloped, trained, strengthened most amazingly, aroused to special 
lines oj effort, set to special duties. Among the most interesting, 
perhaps the most valuable of its possibilities, is that here dis- 
cussed by M. Jules Finot, the noted editor of the Paris Revue. 
Can life be visibly and definitely prolonged, not at some distant 
day by our far-off descendants, but here and now, for each and 
every one of us, usefully, by the rightful direction of the will ? 

What chances, what possibilities, does science thus hold 
out to us ! What shifting of the whole machinery of civilization, 
if we may continue our individual work and our progress for 
a century or beyond ! 



To the nineteenth century may be ascribed the virtue of 
having sanctioned and explained the actual existence of certain 
disturbing facts which have been pointed out by chroniclers 
and historians for many centuries gone by. These facts, 
formerly regarded as lies, have suddenly changed their aspect. 
The power of suggestion, which has been verified, controlled, 
and admitted, has at the same time reduced the number of 
the impostors and miracles of past times. The most unlikely 
XXXVIII [ I ] 



THE WILL 

phenomena have regained^cir veneer of reahty. They are 
no longer contested, because they appear to us natural, possi- 
' ble, verifiable. 

Thus we admit that St. Francis of Assisi, or St. Catherine 
of Siena, may have felt the pains of the Passion. Their pro- 
longed attention fixed on the points where legend says the 
nails and the sword blade pierced the body of Christ, caused 
wounds. The blood flowed from them. These persistent 
wounds may, indeed, have induced in St. Francis, as well as 
much later in Louise Lataud, certain thickenings of skin 
covered with blood, which recalled the nail heads of the cross. 

Why should we deny this palpable effect of suggestion 
while so many others, much more strange, discover them- 
selves to our own eyes? Charles Richet and Barthelemy 
quote the case of a mother, a very nervous woman, who was 
present one day at an alarming spectacle: a heavy curtain- 
rod threatened to become detached and fall on her child kneeling 
close at hand. On the neck of the terrified mother a ring of 
erythema formed at the very place where the child might 
have been struck. 

The influence of our sensations and ideas on our bodies 
is as multifarious as the sensations and ideas themselves. 
Carpenter tells of a man who, in spite of great muscular weak- 
ness, lifted a very heavy weight one day because he thought 
it insignificant. Corvisart attended the Empress Josephine 
and obtained satisfactory results by the administration of 
bread pills. At all times faith in miracles has produced those 
very miracles. Those at Lourdes are only a repetition of the 
votive tablets recovered from the Tiber which testify to the 
extraordinary feats accompHshed by the Asclepiads. "In these 
last days," we read, "a certain Gains, who was blind, learned 
from the oracle that he must repair to the altar, offer up prayers 
there, and then cross the temple from right to left, rest his five 
fingers on the altar, raise his hand, and place it over his eyes. 
He immediately recovered his sight in presence and amid the 
acclamations of the people." 

If we take up the narratives published by Mr. Henri Las- 
serre in his "Lourdes," or by the Abbe Georges Bertin in his 
xxxvin [ 2 ] 



THE WILL 

"Critical History of the Events at LoQfdts," we find similar 
phenomena. A lady who had become epileptic as the result 
of a great fright, submitted herself for examination to a number 
of doctors. All the remedies of science proved powerless. 
But she was taken to the grotto, and that visit, together with 
a novena, restored her to health. 

Parallel to this is a story related by the ancients. A Roman 
soldier, Valerius Aper, recovers his sight because he follows 
the advice of the gods. In conformity with their command, 
he made a pomade of the blood of a white cock mixed with 
some honey, and with that he rubbed his eyes. 

We need only read once again what Charcot, Hack Tuke, 
and many others recount of recoveries by suggestion to doubt 
neither the miracles of Lourdes nor many other miracles dis- 
puted by the centuries, ancient and modern. Even Pom- 
ponace made the malicious observation that while on one 
hand certain cures were only the effect of imagination and of 
faith in certain relics, it sufficed on the other "to put in the 
place of a saint's bones the bones of quite another skeleton 
without any prejudice to the sick. The cure resulted as long 
as the sufferer was ignorant of the change that had been ef- 
fected." Following in the path of merciful tolerance in- 
augurated by Charcot, certain of his adepts practise a resi- 
dence at the grotto of Lourdes on their believing patients. 
They are put to sleep and the idea is suggested to them that 
they are in the sacred grotto. In the same way the Holy 
Virgin is made to intervene. The patients are given to drink 
of the water of the Marne or the Loire, and, with the help of 
saving faith, a gentle and kindly recovery is induced. 

The action on the body of our psychic hfe manifests itself 
thus in all forms. The discovery of the vaso-motor nerves, 
made by Claude Bernard, has enabled us to introduce a little 
order among the numerous and complicated effects pro- 
voked by suggestion both from without and from within (auto- 
suggestion). We now know the controlling action of the 
brain, which by means of the vaso-motor nerves has an effect 
on all our organs. The beating of the heart may become 
slower, quicker, or may even cease under the stress of emo- 
XXXVIII [ 3 ] 



THE WILL 

tions such as anger oi^?ar. A very great fright may e\X'n 
cause death through syncope. 

Intense attention, concentrated on any portion of our 
body, provokes manifest changes there. Thus redness or 
paleness may be induced in the face, or swellings on different 
parts of the body. Certain monks were found with the red 
marks of flagellation or with the signs of Christ's suffering, 
as the result of too prolonged or too often repeated hours of 
ecstasy. Charcot relates numerous cases of the phenomena 
of burns or ecchymoses appearing on the bodies of people as 
a consequence of suggestion directed to that end. 

By the aid of simple suggestion we can thus diagnose 
functional troubles, organic injuries and hemorrhages as well 
as curative vaso-constriction. The cases of cure by sug- 
gestion of the expectoration of blood, and especially of bleed- 
ing from the nose (epistaxis), are exceedingly frequent. This 
has been noticed chiefly in connection with loss of blood caused 
by wounds. Punctures, however deep, in the hypnotic state 
are never accompanied by a flow of blood. 

The ancients, to take Homer's word for it ("Odyssey"), 
were already familiar with the force of suggestion in this respect. 
The wily Ulysses, injured by a boar, had recourse to a special 
incantation in order to stop the blood escaping from his wound. 
By founding our theories on Claude Bernard's vaso-motor 
system we are able to explain in the same way a number of 
other phenomena which we owe to suggestion. Thus, con- 
ditions of our mind, its passions and sentiments, cause the 
strangest reactions on the organism. Faith enables you to cross 
mountains, as our ancestors used to say. Courage gets the better 
of the most redoubtable enemies. It is often not the medicines 
which cure, but the confidence people have in the doctor. 

In their most simple expression the passions cause phe- 
nomena which are easy to control. Strong emotions give rise 
to cold sweats, diarrhoea, anaemias, blood poisoning, arrested 
digestion. Hack Tuke relates the following interesting illus- 
tration of the curative effects of a railway catastrophe : a rheu- 
matic subject, seized with a most painful attack of rheumatism, 
took train in order to go home. His sufferings continued in 
XXXVIII [ 4 ] 



THE WILL 

their most violent form. A collision occurred, caused the 
death of one of the travellers in his compartment, and sud- 
denly put an end to all the patient's pains. 

It would take whole volumes to state the case for the effect 
of mind on matter — that is to say, the effect of our ideas, 
sensations, and sentiments on the body. One incontestable 
fact nevertheless stands out from the examples cited above — 
viz., psychic influences frequently produce the same effects 
as stimulants or mechanical influences. 

It would, however, be very difficult to place all the known 
cases under formal categories, for the simple reason that their 
number is unlimited. When individual impressionability lends 
itself to it we might call forth with the help of the psychic 
factors almost the whole gamut of phenomena yielded by 
material causes. 

What, for instance, could be more disturbing than this 
singular story reported to me the other day? In a dining- 
room where there were about twenty people, one of the hosts, 
brusquely interrupting in a voice choked with strong emotion, 
shouted : "Alas ! we are all poisoned ; the cook has gone mad and 
put arsenic in all the sauces!" Thereupon several people were 
seized with vomiting, others experienced pains like those of 
arsenic poisoning, while a woman fell to the ground over- 
come. . . . The mistake was discovered a few moments later, 
for the supposed arsenic was only mouldy flour that the drunken 
cook had mistaken for poison. 

Under the influence of severe grief the hair changes color 
in the space of a night. Certain emotions act in a special 
way on certain glands. The idea of sorrow experienced pro- 
vokes tears; rage acts on the salivary glands. Shame pro- 
duces a reddening of the cheeks just as the feeling of fear 
affects the functions of the heart and often of the digestive 
organs. Joy facilitates digestion, while anger poisons the 
organism and unsettles its primordial functions. On the 
other hand, serenity of mind quite appreciably induces well- 
being. In this condition all our organs perform their func- 
tions in a way which is nearer the normal, more healthy, and 
more in accordance with the prosperity of the body. 
XXXVIII [ 5 ] 



THE WILL 



II 



When we consider the undoubted reflex action of the mind 
on the body, we may easily rcaHze that nature has placed 
certain means at our disposal for increasing our happiness 
on the earth. We arc somewhat in the position of an owner 
of land in whose depths lie hidden rich veins of gold. What 
should we say of such a man who, while aware of his riches, 
refused to exploit them? 

And yet this is the case with almost all human beings. 
We know how easily handled and how evidently certain are 
these moral instruments which nature has put into our hands, 
and yet how many are there who have recourse to them ? The 
properly used forces of our mind may render us important 
services with regard to the prolongation of our life. As we 
have shown above, there is no doubt that ill-directed sug- 
gestion shortens it. Arrived at a certain age we poison our- 
selves with the idea of or with thoughts about our approach- 
ing end. We lose faith in our own strength, and our strength 
leaves us. On the pretext that age is weighing heavily on our 
shoulders, we take to sedentary habits and cease to pursue 
our occupations with vigor. Little by little our blood, vitiated 
by idleness, and our feebly renewed tissues open the doors to 
all sorts of maladies. Precocious old age lays siege to us, and 
we succumb earlier than we need have done, as a result of 
injurious auto-suggestion. 

Now why should we not endeavor to live by auto-suggestion, 
instead of dying of it ? We might keep before our eyes numerous 
examples of healthy and robust longevity and let our conscious- 
ness be invaded and conquered by the possibility of living be- 
yond a hundred years. Goethe said somewhere: "Man can 
command nature to eliminate from his being all the foreign 
elements which cause him suffering and illness." However, 
negative action is not sufficient. One must also proceed to 
a positive piece of work. One must store up in one's brain 
beneficent, serene, and comforting suggestions. Every one 
knows the fundamental basis of the sect of the "Christian 
Scientists," so wide-spread in the United States. In face of 
xxxviu [ 6 ] 



THE WILL 

an obvious illness, they affirm that it does not exist, and they 
suggest the idea that prayers can conquer every evil. Up to 
the period when, blinded by success, the representatives of this 
new^ belief pushed their method, which is excellent in itself, 
beyond the limits of common sense, unnumbered cures were 
effected by their invocations. These supposed "miracles" 
brought in thousands of adherents and millions of dollars to 
Mother Eddy, the celebrated foundress of this religion, which 
proves so lucrative for its priests. 

Ill 

On a closer study of the life of centenarians, we perceive 
how an optimistic belief in their strength has helped them to 
bear the weight of their years. Baron Waldeck, who died in 
Paris in 1875 at the age of 109, never ceased to entertain the 
"suggestion" that he had still long to live. At the age of 102 
he undertook for the firm of Didot, so Pierre Giffard, his 
biographer, affirms, a three-volume encyclopedia, treating of 
archaeology. Consumed with his idea that the Egyptian civil- 
ization descended in a direct line from the Mexican, he ex- 
tracted from his ardent work reasons for going on living. 
Born under Louis XV. and having travelled at the time of La 
Perouse, this man breakfasted with Laharpe and the Abbe 
Delille, counted Camille Desmoulins among his friends, knew 
Bonaparte as a sub-orderly officer in Egypt and Thiers as a 
drawing master, was present at a series of revolutions, and 
passed away under MacMahon, almost in the plenitude of 
his intellectual forces. 

M. Rigaud, the senior Mayor of France, whom I met during 
the Exposition of 1900, told me that at the age of 92 he was 
in the habit of rising at four in the morning and immediately 
beginning work, after rubbing himself with cold water. 

"How about your 92 years?" I asked, smilingly. 

"I never look at them," he said good-naturedly. 

As a contractor for public works he was still at that period 
personally superintending his workmen. 

One of my friends, a most distinguished Englishman, 
XXXVIII [ 7 ] 



THE WILL 

M. W., whom, in spite of 1^87 years, I am careful not to call 
an old man, leads as acti\^a life as if he were no more than 
thirty. I shall never forget a walk of some hours' duration which 
we took together in order to visit, among other things, on the 
heights of Montmartre, the studio of L. Dhurmer, one of our 
greatest pastel painters. With intense curiosity M. W. set 
to work to study "the secret" of the master's procedure. The 
painter, who had heard tell of the venerable age of his visitor, 
said to him respectfully: 

"There are no longer any secrets to you. Admiral." 

"Don't you rely on that," said M. W., smiling. "I have 
plenty of time before me, and I may yet come into competition 
with you." 

And, as a matter of fact, in the following year, M. W. re- 
newed the lease of his London house for 99 years. 

Mrs. Margaret Neave, who died in 1904 in the island of 
Guernsey, at her estate Rouge Huyshe, at the age of iii, was 
by no means cut off, up to the end of her days, from the out- 
side world. She received visitors and questioned them on 
the affairs of the day. As long as Queen Victoria was alive, 
she never failed to send her an annual telegram of congratula- 
tions on her birthday. The Queen replied with affection and 
carefully examined the portrait of old Mrs. Neave, just as 
some women who are soon expecting to be mothers anxiously 
watch the faces of beautiful children. 

Mme. Viardot, the great friend of Tourgeneff, in spite 
of her advanced age of 84, continues to give singing lessons. 
To her active life and to the absence of all depressing sugges- 
tions she owes her youthfulness of spirit, which makes her one 
of the most agreeable talkers in Paris. I shall never forget 
the vivid portraits she sketched for me of some of the cele- 
brated personages she had met on her long journey. And 
is not "creation" the true gift of youth? 

Such was also the case with the beautiful Mme. Scrivaneek, 
the glorious rival of Dejazet, whom I saw, toward the year 
1900, giving lessons and private tutoring, at the age of about 80. 

We ought to take a flying view in memory of the celebrated 
men who, as nonagenarians or centenarians, have always dis- 
XXXVIII [ 8 ] 



THE WILL 

tinguished themselves by their untiring activity and their 
faith in "their youth." When we think over their caees, we 
realize that it was the suggestion of force, the innate conviction 
that resistance is possible, together with the absence of de- 
pressing ideas, which chiefly contributed to the preservation 
of their health and their prolonged Hfe. So that we see how 
important it is to shut the door of one's heart, or rather of 
one's brain, to all injurious ideas as to stingy limits to life. 
Nature, who created poisons, has also created their antidotes. 
What, for instance, can be more painful to almost all mortals 
than the mere thought of inevitable old age? Nearly as many 
tears have been shed over this necessity as over that of death. 
For those, alas! who tremble at the dark, are quick to per- 
ceive its terrors. And yet this old age, so ill-spoken of and 
so feared, contains within it unsuspected delights. Every- 
thing depends on the angle at which we take up our position 
for observing and studying it. The author of the Epistles to 
Lucillus (XII.) goes into ecstasies over its charms. "Apples 
are not good," he tells us, "until they are beginning to go. 
The beauty of children appears toward the end. . . . Those 
who love wine take the greatest pleasure in the last draught 
they drink. All that is most exquisite in man's pleasures is 
reserved for the end." 

Renan also (" Discours de reception a rAcademie'') dis- 
covered an attractive canvas on which to paint old age, so 
abhorred of all. "Charming age," he says, "that of the Ec- 
clesiast, the most appropriate to serene gaiety, when one begins 
to see, after a most laborious day's work, that all is vanity, but 
also that a number of vain things are worth tasting at leisure." 

What a fragrant bouquet of dehcious and fortifying herbs 
might be culled from the delicate thinkers who have meditated 
long on old age. Try to train yourself in it, and you will taste, 
little by little, under their influence, the charm of quiet, in 
the place of the worries of fear. Yet bad suggestions come 
to us from all sides. We think too much of the diseases of 
our organs, of the using up of our tissue, and of fatal decrepitude. 
We distrust our physical and intellectual forces, our memory, 
our conversational gifts and powers of work. For enemies 
XXXVIII [ 9 ] 



THE WILL 

to our happiness lie in wait for us everywhere. The necessity 
for keeping them out bj^ood suggestions, and above all by 
deliberate auto-suggestion, thus becomes most obvious. 

IV 

We are more cruel to our own interests than nature has 
any idea of being. The human organism of which we speak 
so ill is marvellously solid. Probably there is not a single 
one of the mechanical inventions, on which we so pride our- 
selves, which could withstand with such impunity the many 
senseless shocks to which we subject our body. When one 
thinks of our way of life, which, from the tenderest age, con- 
stantly deranges the numerous wheels of the human machine, 
one cannot but be filled with admiration at its resisting power. 
Not content, however, with throwing it out of gear, we speak 
ill of it endlessly as well. Having used and abused our body 
for a certain number of years, we are then pleased to pro- 
nounce it old, senile, lost. And we proceed to neglect it with 
an absence of care which effects its ruin. After having suffered 
for many years from our excesses and our follies, it succumbs 
under the burden of our gratuitous contempt. And when 
the injury does not come from its own immediate proprietor, 
you may be sure that our neighbors, relations, or friends will 
not fail to throw it in its face. Poor human body! Source 
of so many joys which beautify, nourish, and sustain our life, 
it is nevertheless reduced to the rdle of a mere laughing-stock. 
The reproach of having a mind or a consciousness which is 
either senile or worn out creates in us a feeling of revolt. We 
cannot bear to have any one daring to doubt their strength 
or their youth. And yet how many are there who venture 
to animadvert on a sentence of senility unjustly passed upon 
them? Indeed, men who have reached a certain age bow all 
the more before such a reproach and do their best to deserve it. 

Our superstitions also have a share of the responsibility 
here as in all other things. Almost all of us experience that 
of pseudo-senility. Thus we imagine that at sixty years of 
age or even earlier our hour of retirement has sounded. From 
this moment we give up our occupations, our exercise, our 

XXXVIII [ ID ] 



THE WILL 

pleasures. We withdraw from life and it in turn withdraws 
from us. Now physiology is there to demonstrate to us that 
our organism may yet accomplish all the physiological func- 
tions of the preceding periods. And if our digestion or some 
other function is weak or paralyzed, we have not our years 
to thank, but the bad use to which we have put them. For, 
what is senility? It is the time of life at which a man, who 
has only a worn-out organism at his service, must die his natural 
death. Now this limit, which might theoretically be put at 
one hundred and fifty or two hundred years, exists even in real- 
ity much further off than we venture to believe. 

For a proof of this I will take a series of curious statistical 
tables of deaths from old age in Paris during a period of eleven 
years, which were drawn up by Dr. A. Block (Bulletin de la 
Societe d 'Anthropologic de Paris, 1896). The result shows 
that even in this city of Paris, which has such an unwhole- 
some effect on people's health and longevity, senility, such 
as we have just defined it, appears frequently at the age of 
from eighty to eighty-five, and even some years later. This is 
how the author shows the number of deaths from senility, for 
lack of other visible causes: 

100 and 
Year. 80-85. 85-90. 90-95. 95-100. Over. 

1880 393 213 60 10 I 

1881 465 J 177 36 9 2 

1882 413 214 48 8 I 

1883 454 264 64 15 o 

1884 437 221 59 6 I 

1885 398 238 63 IS o 

1886. 447 255 61 II I 

1887 387 262 58 12 o 

1888 441 271 75 13 I 

1889 555 293 116 32 3 

1890 519 307 116 18 2 

The critical period for an old man in Paris therefore appears 
to be between eighty and eighty-five, for in these five years 
there are the most numerous deaths from senility. The author, 
in comparing all these facts, arrives at the apparently para- 
doxical conclusion that from the age of eighty illness has less 
power over an old man the older he becomes. In other words, 
XXXVIII [11] 



THE WILL 



after having passed this critical age, man has more chance of 
dying of a natural death-^nat is to say, of crossing the thresh- 
old of his centenary. What is the reason of this ? It is very 
simple. It often takes a man eighty years of experience to know 
how to direct the capacities of his organism with precision. 

The most important thing for us is that death from pneu- 
monia, heart disease, and cerebral congestion or hemorrhage, 
is by no means so frequent after the age of sixty as is ordinarily 
beheved. In other terms, the respiratory apparatus, the cir- 
culation, and even the digestive organs continue their functions, 
or rather they have no special reason for not continuing their 
functions. In any case, it is not senile decay, a natural cause, 
which deprives us of their use, but all sorts of accidental causes. 
Which of us has not met men who have passed the age of eighty 
and yet digest and breathe very well and are still enjoying 
all their intellectual faculties ? 

Rational economy in the use of our organs may preserve 
them for their work far beyond a century. Often all that is 
required is that we should be saturated from an early age with 
this truth in order to enable all who are in love with life to 
pass beyond this long stage of the journey. 

V 

Intelligent men have yet another means of prolonging 
their existence, which the poor in spirit cannot practise. I 
mean the control of life and its rational use. 

In his tract on the "Shortness of Life,"^ Seneca asserts 
with reason that "it is not that we have too little time, but 
we lose so much," and that "the smallest part of our life is 
the part we live." 

From that point of departure he combats the pessimism 
of Aristotle who poured out recriminations against nature 
which were hardly worthy of a sage. It is well known that 
the founder of Peripatetics complained bitterly against the 
immortal principle of things which had only considered "the 
animals whose existence was prolonged for five or six cen- 

1 De brevitate vitce. "Non cxiguum temporis habcnius, sed multum 
perdimus," . . . " Exigita pars est vitcs, quam nos vivimus."- 
XXXVIII [ 12 ] 



THE WILL 

turies, while man, born for so great and various a destiny, found 
himself pulled up while still far within these limits." But 
according to Seneca, long life itself only becomes short because 
of our inaptitude in using it. And the philosopher makes 
the profound remark, which has never ceased to be true in 
spite of the number of centuries which stand between us and 
its author : 

"No man permits any encroachment on his field, and for 
the smallest dispute about a boundary stones and javelins 
are let fly, and each suffers his life to be invaded. . , . You 
cannot find any one who will share his money, yet each lavishes 
his life on all comers. All attach importance to the manage- 
ment of their patrimony, but, as soon as it becomes a question 
of loss of time, they are prodigal to excess with the one good 
thing of which it would be beneficial to be stingy." 

In taking up this point of view we see how cruel man is 
with regard to his own interests. We are all agreed as to the 
value of life and time, its supreme expression. Yet rare are 
those who really know how to honor it. Let each one pass 
in review the months and years lost in vices which shorten 
our existence, in a sort of moral or intellectual lethargy which 
ought to be deducted from life, and we can easily see that we 
are our own executioners. We must not believe in the control 
exercised by acts of the civil state, nor even in the outward 
signs of old age. Like the face of a clock, they perform the 
function of mechanical registration. The hidden truth rarely 
corresponds to these formal signs. Such and such a white 
beard or such and such a birth certificate pointing to two or 
three quarters of a century of human life, may perhaps only 
correspond to fifteen or twenty years. The squandering of 
individual lives only finds its equal in that of modern civiliza- 
tion with its armaments and its wars. Let each of us examine 
his conscience and he will tremble with indignation and horror 
at the lion's share of his life which has been destroyed by 
carelessness and lightness. Along with our own errors we 
must include those of our defective systems of education and 
instruction. 

The illnesses which might have been avoided, as well as 
XXXVIII [ 13 ] 



THE WILL 

the evils of the cducatia^P:)f youth, abstract from hfe more 
years than each would recjuire in order to become a centenarian. 
Thus we see that the science of life, the art of using it intelli- 
gently would distinctly prolong its limits. The people who 
groan at the years which in slipping away bring them nearer 
the fatal denouement remind one of the prodigals who lament 
the enforced outlay of a few halfpence, while they are tossing 
sovereigns out of the window. 

How true is the neat saying of Charron: "It is characteristic 
of a great master to enclose much in a little space." It is 
perhaps in this quarter that we might easily find one of the 
numerous keys to long life. 

VI 

But how are we to counteract the depressing influences 
which lie in wait for us every moment of our lives ? Consider 
the evil and the good, and what do we find ? It is often quite 
enough for some one to tell us some thing nice and pleasant 
to produce a condition of peace and serenity in our minds. 
More important still: often in the grip of analytical melan- 
choly or of unlimited despair we sit down to think over our 
case. After careful examination we find it by no means so 
exasperating. If we continue our thinking the calmer aspects 
of the event stand out with reassuring clearness. They even 
smile at us good-naturedly, and we may confidently abandon 
ourselves to their tender mercies. Thus unhappy impres- 
sions fade away, injurious or depressing sentiments become 
less acute, and, just as the surface of a lake which has been 
disturbed by the invasion of some body from outside regains 
its habitual stillness, so our conscious mind regains its equi- 
librium. For, in nature, there is nothing either absolutely 
good or absolutely bad. In the saddest things there is an 
element of sweetness, if not of gayety. It is our business to 
seek it, and having found it to make good use of it. 

A wise man will do still more. Instead of having recourse, 
on special occasions, to this beneficent fairy, he will wish to 
keep her always close to him. Looking into her smiling face, 
XXXVIII [ 14 ] 



THE WILL 

he will acquire renewed strength for each misfortune. He 
will let life's furrows be smoothed away by her musical laughter. 
Cross-grained philosophers and psychologists will no doubt 
say that this is optimism unworthy of superior men. What 
does that matter ? We may say what evil we like of optimism, 
but we must admit all the same that it is closely bound up 
with the fortunes of human beings. It is all very well to try 
to substitute the philosophy of ill-temper, in other words, 
gnawing pessimism, as the natural system of humanity. We 
have only to examine a man a little nearer and to observe 
with what joy he entertains the smiles of the good fairy and 
turns from the grimaces of pessimism to see which way nature 
draws him. If we cast a look round us we notice how in- 
stinctively a man lets himself be drawn along by his own 
optimistic tendencies. The many games of chance with their 
risks bordering on the unlikely; the thronging of the liberal 
professions where success is rare ; the faith in political panaceas, 
and the spectacle of so many other of the games of life where 
impregnable belief in a happy issue constantly dominates the 
fear of misfortune all go to prove it. Humanity left to itself, 
as Dr. Max Nordau says somewhere, gives way by prefer- 
ence and by instinct to happy influences. Consequently these 
have more chance of possessing us. All we need is to utilize 
them for our own happiness. 

I cannot contemplate the vast fields of international litera- 
ture without emotion. 

Millions of people of the writing profession make a living 
out of the misery and scorn of the public and the critics. Yet 
they continue to introduce their works often at the cost of 
appalling injuries to their self-respect. In their robust faith 
in the future they discount the glory of to-morrow and even 
that due to them from far-off generations. And yet they 
cannot ignore the fact that out of the thousands of works and 
of writers who preceded us, not more than a few hundreds 
have survived. In comparison with the chances which we 
have in the lottery of literary glory, a share in the Panama 
or the Credit Foncier of Paris might almost be considered a 
certainty of a big haul. 

XXXVIII [ 15 ] 



THE WILL 

What has become of tl^greatcst poets of Greece? Which 
of us has ever read a single Une of Simonidcs, who was fifty-six 
times a winner in the prize competitions; or of Philetas, whom 
Theocritus despaired of ever cqualhng? Max Bonnet, in his 
" Classical Philology," argues that Homer, Sophocles, and Eurip- 
ides have only survived because they have been made subjects 
for the practical studies of our youth! This is how the glory 
of these immortal poets is maintained from among all the 
men who had the opportunity of living in an epoch when, 
as is said, mankind was not suffering from any embarrass- 
ment of talent or genius. Were it not for our rooted opti- 
mism the millions of writers who spring up all over the world 
would no doubt snap their pens and take to more peaceful 
and, O irony supreme! more durable work. Thus there is 
nothing easier than to reach the port of happiness by trusting 
one's self to optimist currents. 

Yet those who feel incapable of putting this comforting 
philosophy in practice may have recourse to a surprisingly 
simple method. It is none the less ethcacious. Every one 
knows the story of the sick man, who, while suffering from 
neuralgia, argued so well with his pain that it finally disappeared. 
What is required is auto-suggestion for each given case, instead 
of falling back on some general doctrine. Does not psycho- 
therapeutics, the new departure in medicine, teach us that 
certain illnesses disappear as if by enchantment as the result 
of constantly repeated suggestions? Dr. F. Regnault relates 
that in treating a hypochondriac he advised him to write on 
the walfevery evening the words, "I am happy," and to go off 
to sleep in full view of them. After a few weeks happiness 
began to steal into his spirit. Which of us, in speaking of 
God, does not instinctively turn toward the sky? Neither 
science nor reason can prevail against the mechanical repeti- 
tion of the phrase, which is yet so contrary to the most ele- 
mentary notions of astronomy; "Our Father, which art in 
Heaven." In moments of distress, astronomers themselves 
may be found seeking for their God in some hidden corner 
of the universe! 

XXXVIII [ i6 ] 



THE WILL 



VII 



What endless resource is provided in this way against the 
invading years! Let us accept them with confidence and 
look on them with the softness which befits men of wisdom. 
Let us ever keep before our eyes comforting examples of serene 
old age and probable longevity. Little by little our opti- 
mistic visions will become a guard of honor. They will be 
on the watch that poisonous fears do not take possession of 
our consciousness. Those who are not sensitive to this sur- 
rounding atmosphere of reasoned thought may, on the other 
hand, have recourse to direct and repeated suggestion. Let 
us then repeat every day and at every moment when the fears 
of helpless old age come back to memory, first of all that it is a 
long way off, and secondly let us remind ourselves of its attrac- 
tions. This direct action on the mind will have extraordinary 
results. And as the hypochondriac comes to be always smihng 
by continually telling himself that he is happy, so people 
obsessed by the thought of old age and death may be restored 
to calm at their approach. 

Our unreasoned fears, by demoralizing our minds, only 
accelerate their destructive advance. In facing them with 
the careful consideration worthy of a well-informed man, we 
remove our limits. Our apprehensions are put to sleep [under 
the influence of thought just as, according to the Indians, 
the evil desires of love are by malalis. 

Let us especially put ourselves under the most powerful 
influence of all, that of work. Let us prolong our youth under 
the protection of these illusions. Let us use our minds rather 
than enfeeble our bodies for want of occupation. In a word, 
let us not give ourselves time to grow old! 

The inevitable visitation which must at some time lead 
in the two dreaded sisters, old age and death, will not only 
take place later, but, what is more essential, will become a 
thing almost to be desired. They will be awaited like guests 
who are to bring us at some distant, even at some very dis- 
tant, day, the attractive charm of their sweet and peaceful 
melancholy. 

XXXVIII [ 17 ] 



XXXIX 



THE HOPE 

"THE UNKNOWN GOD" 

BY 

SIR HENRY THOMPSON 



T/f/^E approach the close of our series. We have faced life from 
'^' many sides, examined it in many aspects. From the 
immaterial side, the side of creation, of godhood, and of mystery, 
we are perhaps ready to ask ourselves the 'final question, What 
shall we, what can we, what at heart do we believe of an existence 
beyond and above us? Upon this mighty subject each individual 
has meditated perforce, with whatsoever of profundity and ear- 
nestness lies within his nature. Positive conclusions, drawn 
partly perhaps from an inherited faith, partly from a limited 
personal experience, are held by some among us with a pas- 
sionate intensity which defies doubt almost as a crime. Others 
cry clamorously to their neighbors for fuller light. Others have 
pushed the question aside impatiently as beyond solution. What, 
let us ask ourselves, would a thoughtful man believe who had 
seen all life and studied all religions without, if such a case 
were possible, a preconceived partiality for any one among the^n ? 
What in brief will the man of the future believe when he has 
come to know all that may be knowable on earth? 

The first of these two questions we can answer partly, though 
not the second. We have here the words of a man famous in 
the annals of medicine, a noted English physician who until 
his recent death was not only a leader in his profession but a man 
of mark in the social world, a diplomat and ^^ friend of kings." 
Sir Henry Thompson ranked as "physician extraordinary" 
XXXIX [ I ] 



THE HOPE 

to more than one of the croitkd heads of Europe. He was not 
a professional writer, but early in lijc he began that serious and 
untratnmelled search into religion which here finds such striking 
literary expression. This summing up in a strictly logical way 
of the conclusions he had finally reached was Sir Henry's last 
important work, his legacy to the world. That he does not liter- 
ally accept Christianity need afflict no Christian mind. Rather 
should each one draw encouragement from the fact that while 
wholly ignoring "revelation'' this profound investigator has 
reached results so close akin to all its teachings. 

An attempt to seek, by a carefully made induction from available 
data, some certain assurance respecting the influence which the 
"Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed" has 
exercised on Man t^oughout his long career on Earth. 

"But amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the 
more they are thought about, there will remain the absolute certainty 
that he (the Astronomer) is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal 
Energy, from which all things proceed." — Herbert Spencer, Nine- 
teenth Century Review, Jan., 1884. 



I SUPPOSE there can be no doubt in the mind of any intelligent 
student of Nature, by which term is to be understood the numer- 
ous and multiform phenomena which any and every part of the 
Universe within his reach presents, that careful investigation 
inevitably leads to a conviction that all are subject to a uniform 
order and regularity in their varied operations. And this reg- 
ularity is to be regarded as applying to all such phenomena, 
whether they be only mechanical movements of inert matter, 
or those more complicated forms of activity associated with 
what is termed — but not yet understood — as "Life," either 
in the animal or vegetable world. For an example, let us 
consider that magnificent array which we call the "Heavens," 
concerning which it is well known that millions of stars are 
individually identified and registered by the astronomer, and 
that each is a central sun, more or less like our own, pursuing 
a rapid course, absolutely uniform and therefore calculable, 
so that its exact position in the sky can be predicted for any future 
XXXIX [ 2 ] 



THE HOPE 

minute of time, even (say) in the next century. No less ordered 
in its movement is each of the smaller orbs constituting our 
own solar system; the eclipse of one by the intervening passage 
of another, or, may be, only by a shadow cast upon it in its 
course, being predicable with like certainty years before the 
event occurs. 

One more example, but from the no less wonderful and 
extensive world of the exceeding small. A competent observer 
may, on seeing attached to a certain leaf a minute ovum, be 
able infallibly to predict the future career of the animal which 
will emerge therefrom, its coming changes in size and form, the 
duration of its existence, and the fact that it will assuredly give 
rise to other beings like itself. Hundreds of like illustrations 
might be adduced, but the above amply suffice for the present 
purpose. 

II 

Familiar with the apparently universal presence of a uni- 
form order dominating the operations of all that is understood 
as Matter, roughly classed as organic and inorganic, it is almost 
impossible to conceive our observer capable of resisting a con- 
viction that some marvellous source of Energy exists behind, or 
is immanent in, the "Universe," accepting this as an appro- 
priate term by which to denote the sum total of all the phenom- 
ena within our reach. And thus the idea is naturally and 
strongly suggested, that what he knows as ordered arrangement 
as exercised among men is manifested in Nature, but with a 
more complete and far greater certainty and stability of result 
in the latter case. For "Man" being himself, beyond all 
question, the most perfect example of intelligent activity known 
to man, must necessarily be the type or measure by which 
he can attempt to estimate any other manifest source of analo- 
gous activity, however infinitely greater than himself, and con- 
ceived by him as the paramount and ever-present origin or 
Cause of all Existence. 

Let me then venture in pursuing this inquiry to suggest that 
the "Infinite and Eternal Energy" thus postulated as the pro- 
ductive source of all Natural phenomena may be regarded by 
XXXIX [ 3 ] 



THE HOPE 

man, notwithstanding hi^^ecessarily limited purview, as to 
a certain extent analogous — being dissimilar rather in the 
transcendent vastness of its scope than in the mode — with that 
by which a human will is exercised. This being granted, I 
cannot but conclude that the unknown source may, and can 
only, be studied, with the view of acquiring any knowledge 
respecting its nature, by the single method or instrument which 
man has hitherto employed to acquire all the knowledge he 
has obtained during the long period of his existence in this 
world, viz., by the careful study of phenomena, and by collect- 
ing all data respecting them which are proved to be absolute 
facts. These being collated and carefully considered, may in 
time enable him to infer, with more or less certainty, the exist- 
ence of manifest tendencies, denoting the possession of at- 
tributes or disposition manifested by the Unknown Power, and 
furnishing data capable of being appreciated or described as 
exercising a beneficial influence, or the reverse, on the Human 
Race, and also upon all lower forms of Animal Life. 

in 

But perhaps it might here be urged. Why not avoid the 
circumlocution involved by referring to a possible Supreme 
Cause of all things in such terms as "Infinite and Eternal 
Energy," or the like, and adopt one of the brief words which have 
been in general use, as " Jehovah," "Theos," " Jove," or " God"? 
I reply that they are avoided precisely because each of them 
has become so completely identified by long association of ideas 
with schemes of theological doctrine based on the alleged ex- 
istence of personal appearances on the earth of the beings 
thus named, founded on ancient legends which have served 
without doubt as useful provisional working hypotheses during 
the early ages of man's history, but for the scientific inquirer, 
i.e., the patient seeker after truth, are necessarily replaced by 
less defined and more abstract terms. For, as we have seen, 
no human mind can entertain, much less express, any definite 
idea of the nature or attributes pertaining to the Source of all 
power, "Infinite and Eternal," without conveying at the same 
XXXIX [ 4 ] 



THE HOPE 

time the idea of a Being or Personality; man's conceptions being 
limited by his knowledge of the highest achievements of his own 
race. Hence the universal use of anthropomorphic symbols, 
and the necessary formation of inadequate corresponding ideas, 
respecting the vast, inscrutable, and unknown source and origin 
of all things; whence an "eidolon" results, no better than those 
which have been carved by the hands of every race in its early 
history, possessing none but the crudest legends derived from 
necessarily ignorant ancestry. And thus every man to-day 
who has imbibed any idea of a material semblance representing 
in his mind a personal "God," conditioned by terms expressive 
of human attributes, has but made an idol for himself. And 
no two such men can ever by any possibility make the same; 
each of these impressions or concepts must be that of the indi- 
vidual alone, and from the very nature of things no two can 
be alike. 

To return then to the subject of our proposed inquiry: 
there is but one mode of prosecuting it to its farthest extent with 
the faculties which man at present possesses, viz., the patient 
diligent examination of natural phenomena on a large scale. 
And let it be remarked here that by the phenomena of the 
Universe, or Nature, are to be understood not only those im- 
pressions on our senses which arise by contact with what is 
understood as the external world, but also those impressions 
which are derived from a study of what we know as our own 
consciousness — a distinction without a difference, retained in 
deference to popular habits of thought, since every acquisition 
of knowledge involves an act of consciousness. 

In this way and by this alone can we be sure of attaining our 
object, at all events to some extent. It is impossible to com- 
prehend the vastness and sublimity of the idea which the terms 
"illimitable space" and "endless time" express; although 
doubtless strictly applicable to the source of the Infinite and 
Eternal Energy, concerning the nature and tendencies of which 
we but crave, if possible, humbly to learn something more than 
heretofore, by the mode of inquiry already suggested. An ob- 
ject which beyond all others is, perhaps, the sublimest and 
most attractive which our life and its surroundings can offer. 
XXXIX [ 5 ] 



THE HOPE 



IV 



We will next consider the question, What has Man ac- 
quired during his long career by the so-called Supernatural 
revelations alleged to have been communicated to him by a 
supreme and all-powerful Deity? 

Whatever he may have learned, "at sundry times and in 
divers manners," by means of "Divine Revelation," this fact 
at least must be universally admitted, viz., that the single ob- 
ject of all of them has been to inculcate Religious and Moral 
duties. The Religious duties have consisted chiefly in demand- 
ing constant and humble service to an Omnipotent Deity, one 
God, of whom, taking the words attributed to the Founder 
of Christianity as a command, he said, "Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with 
all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment" 
(Matthew c, xxii., v. 37, 38) — a service the neglect of 
which, according to the tenets of Christianity, entails the 
severest punishment, not in the present, but in a future and 
eternal hell; while a never-ending life of supreme happiness is 
promised as the reward of faithful obedience. 

The Moral obligations enforced, that is, the conduct of 
Man to his fellows, are signified and enunciated by impressive 
exhortations to charity and kindness to the poor and afflicted. 
The passage above quoted continues as follows: "And a second 
like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" 
(Matthew c. xxii., v. 39). Then follow the significant words, 
so opposed to the oppressive ceremonial of the ancient Jewish 
usages then in force: "On these two commandments hangeth 
the whole law, and the prophets" (v. 40).^ 

Subsequently Christianity, organized by the great Teacher's 
immediate followers, who were Greeks speaking and writing 
that language, took the form of the Greek or Eastern Church 
during the second century of our era. The doctrines of Chris- 
tianity are still taught in that tongue throughout Russia, where 
it is the National Church to this day. From this source the 

* Revised Version used throughout. 
XXXIX [ 6 ] 



THE HOPE 

Romish Church arose, and allying itself to the Imperial power 
the Bishop of Rome soon became the Pope, and an infallible 
head of the Catholic Church, requiring absolute obedience in all 
matters of faith and practice from her adherents. In England 
the Reformed or Protestant Religion is the National Church ; and 
notwithstanding its evident and admitted defects, its inevitable 
division into numerous hostile sects, differing seriously respect- 
ing matters of belief, it has doubtless been in past ages well 
suited to the nations who have embraced it and have been 
influenced thereby. Thus the establishment of public hospitals 
and other institutions for the care of the poor and afflicted are 
found among the European races who have adopted the re- 
ligious faith which is identified chiefly with the young Jew- 
ish devotee whose history, although imperfectly known as to 
matters of detail, affords little ground for doubt that he taught 
his followers very little or no dogma, but simply the worship 
of One God, "His Father" — and "Theirs" also — the practice 
of kindness, truth, self-denial and of a simple and blameless 
life ; and that he set them the example of going about doing good 
to others, even to their enemies. 

And such charity and care for the suffering is held in all parts 
of the world to be the duty of Man, wherever he has become 
civilized, as we shall hereafter see. And let it be added here 
once and for all, that each of the varied forms of Religion which 
have appeared on earth, although claiming to be supernaturally 
revealed, must be regarded as the natural outcome of Man's 
own wants and feelings, the sense of his desire to recognize a 
Power above him — "One that is greater than I" — worthy to be 
worshipped ; trusted in for help in time of need, for justice when 
oppressed; One that might hear his prayers and accept his 
sacrifice. All have been useful aids in his progress, and have 
arisen as the natural result of his own development. 

A brief sketch of the chief religions which have thus arisen 
in the later ages of the world's history may follow here. That 
with which we in this country are necessarily most familiar, by 
no means the oldest in point of date, is believed to have origi- 
nated among the ancient Semitic race, and was known as Juda- 
ism, still largely prevalent, but modified at a comparatively re- 
XXXIX [ 7 ] 



THE HOPE 

cent date, that adopted toi^rk our own era a.d., by the out-, 
growth and separation of an important and powerful religious 
organization and creed, which has been already noticed, Chris- 
tianity, now accepted by the greater part of Europe and its 
dependencies and by the United States of America. The most 
ancient of all known to us is the system of religious worship 
and rites of early Egypt, of which interesting records exist dating 
certainly to 5,000 B.C. After these should be named the re- 
ligions of Babylonia and Assyria, which follow Egypt closely 
in respect of antiquity. An ancient lawgiver in China, Con- 
fucius, who flourished about 550 B.C., was remarkable for his 
honest and upright rule, led a virtuous life, and had many 
disciples. He sought knowledge from every available source, 
and after death his acts and sayings were collected by them in 
several books, the chief of which is his " Code of Morals," which 
contained among many other precepts the precise words of the 
Golden Rule of Christian Scripture. But he taught nothing 
respecting a god or religious worship. The ancient religion of 
the Persians, now that of the Parsees, was to a great extent 
founded by Zoroaster, who lived at least 800-900 years B.C., 
possibly earlier. Subsequently it became related in some de- 
gree with Sanskrit. Its ancient writings form "the Zend 
Avesta" or commentaries. One great and good creator was 
recognized ("Ormuzd"), regarded as dual at a later period, 
whose emblem was fire; and evil spirits headed by (" Ahriman"), 
the spirit of evil, opposed him. Numerous sacrifices and pen- 
ances were enforced; strict purity of life was held essential in 
all the disciples of the faith. Somewhat later is the religion of 
Buddha, which possesses the largest number of followers of any 
religion in the world. Its origin dates from about 500 B.C., 
when its founder, a royal prince in Northern India (Prince 
Saddhartha), devoted himself to an ascetic life and contem- 
plation, and to a study of the causes of things, regarding ig- 
norance as the greatest evil. The records" made by his adher- 
ents became sacred books, and the cult flourishes not only in 
India, but throughout a large part of Chin^. It suffices only to 
mention briefly the religious Hierarchies of ancient Greece and 
Rome, constituted by large groups of deities, some arising out 
XXXIX [ 8 ] 



THE HOPE 

of historic legends. The divinities so-called of Greece were 
especially represented as exhibiting all the f oUies and vices of hu- 
manity. Those of Rome were related rather with the needs 
of husbandry, or of the shepherd and his flocks — as well as those 
of the house and the family: hence the "Lares and Penates." 
For the former the Greek poets and satirists had little respect ; 
while the philosophers derided the rites and ceremonies which 
were largely performed by the common people, but they in- 
culcated the advantages of a good Hfe as acceptable to the Gods.' 
Of any future state their views were at first indistinct, but 
gradually a belief was established in some system of future re- 
wards and punishments after death. There were no sacred 
books, and any idea of an evil spirit or devil was unknown. 
More recent than Christianity was the advent of Mahometanism 
(570-622 A.D.), in the divine origin of which its followers have 
the profoundest belief, adducing ample evidence thereof. It is 
more closely allied to Christianity than any other, since it 
recognizes one supreme God as the "Only God," together with 
the claims of Moses and the Jewish prophets, even those of 
Jesus Christ himself, to have received Divine authority; thence- 
forth, however, to be superseded by the Prophet. To its later 
date may perhaps be attributed his wise laws and regulations, 
which are minutely recorded in the Koran, and contain numer- 
ous incentives to the constant practice of charity, mercy, and 
kindness. Moreover, he absolutely proscribed the use of all 
intoxicating liquors, and also of betting and gambling, two 
vices which are disastrously prominent in all Christian coun- 
tries. 

V 

I propose now to make a brief outline of the history of Man's 
long and painful progress while slowly acquiring knowledge 
of the objects by which he has been surrounded, that is to say, 

^Socrates, born 469 b.c, concerned himself with Ethics, and 
taught that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance; Plato, born 
427 B.C., was the master of Aristotle, born 384 b.c. Both taught 
that goodness and truth are among the highest virtues, although the 
latter differed in many other things from his master. 
XXXIX ' [ 9 ] 



THE HOPE 

of the numerous and vai#ll conditions and influences to which 
the course of Nature has everywhere exposed him; and thus to 
demonstrate that he has attained his present position solely 
by his own unaided efforts. For as before stated it is cer- 
tain that no record exists to show that any divine or super- 
natural revelation has ever afforded man aid or instruction iii 
matters relating to his physical well-being during the laborious 
course he has pursued througliout countless ages of tardy and 
difficult progress, from the earliest savage life to the present day. 
Every advantage has taken place by the gradual improvement of 
his faculties through the development of a more complex brain 
through lower forms, until it has attained its present condition, 
with capability of increase in coming ages to an unknown extent. 
Man at first acquired an activity of brain and nervous 
system not possessed by those of his progenitors, now termed 
"Anthropoid Apes." These had gradually assumed a more or 
less upright position for special purposes of the body, thus 
differentiating the four legs of a lower animal into upper and 
lower extremities each employed for special and distinctive 
service. These large apes usually took shelter among the lofty 
branches of large forest trees, and lived chiefly on fruit and nuts, 
with now and then eggs and young birds. Like them, man 
probably at first used similar food, but in course of time added 
thereto the flesh of wild animals trapped in the forest and fish 
caught in the streams. Exposed to cold, wind, tempests, and 
inundations, he made himself clothes from the skins of the 
animals he learned to kill, and inhabited natural caverns which 
he probably excavated or improved for himself; at first, perhaps, 
by using for the purpose portions of the branches of trees blown 
down by the wind. Or of these he might also construct rude 
huts to protect himself and his young ones from the elements, and 
from the attacks of carnivorous foes of many kinds. He would 
soon learn to make long pointed stakes of hard wood, to be 
used as weapons for defence or to kill animals for food. 
Abundant evidence exists in many parts of the world that in 
prehistoric times flints were utilized as cutting instruments for 
such and other purposes; at first being rudely broken into thin 
flakes so as to produce a sharp edge. These have been found in 
XXXIX [ lo ] 



THE HOPE 

great quantity, some of them very skilfully made, in caverns and 
in other places of deposit. When the use of the bow as an 
instrument of propulsion for killing prey and in fighting had 
been discovered, it was rendered more efficient by tipping the 
arrows with sharp flint points as arrow-heads. From very large 
flints were also fashioned axes for cutting wood, etc., and for 
weapons. They were attached to wooden handles by a strip 
of hardened animal hide. Some of these flint instruments were 
ultimately made with serrated edges for use as saws. The bones 
of small animals were utilized for making needles and other 
finely pointed instruments. 

The Flint Age was succeeded by the discovery of copper and 
by the use of bronze, of which weapons and utensils were 
thenceforth largely made, and used almost universally for 
several centuries; to be superseded by the discovery in modern 
times of iron, and its conversion into steel for appliances of all 
kinds as at present. 

The process by which man acquired the first rudiments of 
the great faculty of speech must have been a very gradual one. 
The earliest attempts probably consisted in improving upon the 
rude sounds, and even musical notes, by which the lower ani- 
mals expressed tender emotions to their mates, and approached 
the rival or the enemy with loud and angry cries, which signified 
displeasure or even a challenge to combat. Language of a primi- 
tive kind followed, and took the place of signs, as association 
with his fellows slowly improved by experience; while the growth 
of family ties, often apparent among some of the lower animals, 
became naturally more highly developed by man, and the 
aggregation of families on some fertile or sheltered spot gave 
rise to the formation of a small community. These increased 
in size, until the larger combination of a tribe resulted, leading 
to the adoption of customs gradually acquired to promote the 
common welfare. By this means the principle of sacrificing 
a certain portion of personal liberty by each individual, for 
the good of the "commonwealth," was gradually discovered 
to be a wise arrangement and to promote the happiness of all. 
Man became social in his habits, and — without knowing it — 
learned the first lesson not only in law, but in ethics, the value 
XXXIX [ 1 1 ] 



THE HOPE 

of self-denial for the god#^of all. And it is worthy of note 
that each tribe, in course of time, generally became provided 
with its local Deity, and with some rudimentary form of re- 
ligious worship. 

Thus, various languages naturally arose in different parts of 
the world. The common objects daily seen, by the members 
of each tribe or community, would be identified by a sound or 
word, suggested perhaps by the appearance of the object, and 
adopted in order to denote it. All the first words were there- 
fore nouns; and by the same process their qualities came to be 
indicated, and adjectives were employed to describe them. 
Action had to be expressed, and verbs came into use; applicable 
to the past, present, and future in respect of deeds. While 
articles and pronouns appeared, for obvious purposes, and so 
on. In this manner a spoken literature was formed, and was 
transmitted as "hearsay" from father to son, in the forms of 
tradition, story, proverb, or song. Long after, written symbols 
were invented and the permanence of these traditions pro- 
vided for. Much interesting light on man's early history has 
been obtained by modern scientific researches in connection 
with ancient languages. The rights of personal ownership 
must have been recognized at an early period in man's social 
history. The maker of a flint axe or the builder of a hut would 
naturally be entitled to regard these as belonging to him for his 
own exclusive use, and the idea of property came to be realized. 
Then the mode of transferring of property from one owner 
to another had to be provided for. At first it was by barter 
only — a custom at present still extant among savage tribes. 
Then, as the community increased, some "common medium of 
exchange" was found, through objects generally prized, as 
skins, cowrie shells, etc., etc. It became necessary next to 
find some article which could be adopted as " a measure of 
value," and also one which could be stored without deprecia- 
tion in quality; which led to the use of the precious metals, 
gold and silver, copper and bronze being employed for articles 
of small value; and ultimately to the circulation of portions 
of each metal — known weights — as coins, and stamped as such 
by the chief authority. 

XXXIX [12] 



THE HOPE 

The discovery of fire, and the power of producing it at will, 
must have marked an epoch in his early history; friction be- 
tween two pieces of hard wood is known to have been practised 
for the purpose of producing it by the isolated savage inhabitants 
of distant islands in the Pacific, discovered by some early 
navigator some centuries ago. And continuous light was pro- 
vided for by rude oil lamps, which as well as common drinking- 
vessels were made of a primitive form of pottery. 

Agriculture, in an elementary form, became an occupation 
at a very early period, by the sowing of seeds which produced 
edible vegetables; and selection of the seed-bearing grasses, 
by cultivation of the best growths, led in the course of years to 
the production of the grains now known as rye, oats, wheat, 
maize, rice, etc. Meantime the gradual domestication and 
breeding of animals for flesh and milk as food, and also for 
employment in draught, such as of carts on rollers and rude 
wheels, etc., increased man's resources considerably. The 
hollow trunks of trees were utilized, and trimmed into shape, to 
form canoes and boats ; and these were equipped with sails when 
the art of weaving mats from dried wide-leaved plants from 
marshy soils had been attained. 

Not only by sailors for the purpose of navigation at night, 
but by the shepherds with their flocks on extensive plains, 
attentive observations to the course of the sun and moon by 
day, and of the greater stars by night served the purpose of 
timekeeping. And the sun's rays by day were made to record 
themselves automatically, by marking the process of a shadow 
from an upright stake in the ground — a rudimentary dial. These 
early attempts were followed by careful observers among the 
Chaldaeans, Chinese, and Hindoos. The first mentioned, prob- 
ably some 3,000 years B.C., named the chief stars and grouped 
some of the constellations, divided the day into hours, etc. The 
Ptolemaic system followed, and is a record of researches first 
made by Hipparchus, the Greek philosopher (about 150 B.C.), 
by Ptolemy of Alexandria (middle of second century a.d.), who 
extended his predecessor's work and left voluminous records 
which more or less maintained their influence until the appear- 
ance of the great mediaeval observers, soon to follow. 
XXXIX [ 13 ] 



THE HOPE 

Here it may be appr^-iute to recall the fact that up to a 
comparatively recent period the Western nations universally 
regarded the earth as a large circular plain with an undulating 
surface, forming the centre of the universe. Those especially 
who were acquainted with the records known to us as "Sacred 
Writ," learned from it that the "Heavens above" formed the 
special dweUing-place of "Jehovah," "God" of the universe, 
surrounded by ministering angels who executed His will, 
often indeed appearing in bodily form to man to announce 
His behests. From the same source he learned also that, on 
the fourth day of creation, "God made two great lights"; the 
greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; 
he made the "stars also" (Gen., chap, i., v. i6). All these were 
supposed to be fixed in " a firmament " which revolved round the 
earth, the latter having no movement of any kind. 

Below this plain, at an unknown but not great depth, there 
was a region of gloom, which the spirits of the dead inhabited, 
known as "Sheol"; from which by means of the "Seer," they 
could sometimes be recalled to earth in order to foretell events ; 
since a few of those who, during fife, had been distinguished 
as favorites of Jehovah were believed to be capable of so doing. 

The very "recent period" named above may be more 
distinctly indicated by devoting a few^ lines to define the views 
of three of the principal early astronomers. 

Copernicus (1473-1543 a.d.) beheved the sun was always at 
rest, and formed the centre of the universe ; that the earth was 
a spherical body, which, with other planets, moved round it, 
but revolved on its own axis, thus causing day and night. He 
had no idea of the importance of the stars, but regarded them 
as lesser lights at an uncertain distance. 

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601 a.d.), who believed that the sun 
moved around the earth, will be named as holding a distin- 
guished position in the annals of the science. He had a noble 
observatory well furnished with instruments, and gave an im- 
pulse to astronomical studies. 

Galileo (1564-1642) was the first to employ an arrangement 
of lenses, for the purpose of forming an astronomical telescope, 
by which means he discovered the IMilky Way to be formed of 
XXXIX [ 14 ] 



THE HOPE 

separate stars. He afterward openly taught at Rome his 
belief in the rotation of the earth on its axis, and its annual 
passage round the sun; and was in consequence summoned 
before the Holy Inquisition, and was tortured and imprisoned 
when seventy years of age for persisting in his opinion, but he 
was ultimately set at liberty by the succeeding Pope. 

It now only remains to be said that unceasing and intelligent 
study and greatly improved telescopes in every part of the 
civilized world, aided by the recently discovered arts of photog- 
raphy and spectrum-analysis, have led to the astonishing re- 
sults achieved during the nineteenth century. 

The astronomical discoveries which, as above observed, 
man's own unaided labors have achieved, demonstrate beyond all 
possibility of doubt that the so-called Mosaic records, above 
quoted, are quite untrustworthy. Nevertheless, they are still 
accepted by all Christian Churches, and are publicly read, in 
turn with other extracts equally questionable, twice or thrice a 
week as "Holy Scripture." The earth is now known to be an 
insignificant speck, a mere atom of dust in the universe, and 
that the millions of stars, visible with any good telescope, are 
suns like our own, many being much larger, and that these are 
almost certainly surrounded by encircling planets; since spec- 
trum-analysis has proved that the same chemical elements which 
are so active in every part of our own system, are also the com- 
ponents of every one of the rest within our ken. Now it is im- 
possible for any one familiar with scientific chemistry to con- 
ceive that those potent elements oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, 
nitrogen, carbon, calcium, sodium, the metals, and the rest, 
can be present there without activity. Hence we are impelled 
to believe that the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms are 
in course of development in each of those innumerable systems, 
and will become active with the stage of fitness, varying, of 
course, according to the temperature at which each in its history 
has arrived; a certain very moderate range only of heat being 
compatible with the existence of vegetable and animal Hfe. 
Hence it is impossible not to believe that a large proportion are 
inhabited by organisms more or less akin to those which flourish 
here. We, in our little home of earth, may well be devoutly 
XXXIX [ 15 ] 



THE HOPE 



humble in presence of th^^andeur of the universe, and in the 
still greater grandeur of the Author, if we may descend for a 
moment to the use of an anthropomorphic term to designate the 
Power of whom nothing can be truly known but by the study of 
the phenomena around us. 



VI 

I shall not furnish in detail any further history of Man's 
progress to illustrate what he has accomplished by his own 
unaided efforts; but shall simply enumerate, in a tabular form, 
some of the chief results which he has achieved thereby : 

I. All that is comprehended under the general term of 
"Fine Arts" — painting, sculpture, architecture, metal- work, 
fictile products, pottery, etc. 

II. The discovery of gravitation, and the laws* which govern 
force. At a later period, the conservation of energy. 

III. The discovery of the laws of light, heat, and sound. 

IV. All that is comprehended by the science of chemistry, and 
its innumerable practical applications to every department of 
human activity. 

V. The discovery of the existence and of the laws of electric- 
ity, the utility of which it is already impossible to overestimate. 

The word "Law," as used here and in other parts of this essay, 
has always the restricted sense of implying any ordinary sequence of 
events which a faithfully observed experience has led man to believe 
will continue. As Huxley says in his well-known " Essay on Decartes" : 
" 'Law' means a rule which we have always found to hold good, 
and which we expect always will hold good." . . . He further 
observes — explaining that all knowledge is relative to the individual, 
and that all the phenomena of Nature are known to us only as facts 
of consciousness — that the conclusions logically drawn from them 
are always verified by experience. (Vide Decartes, Discourse on 
Using One's Reason Rightly, etc." Huxley's Collected Works, vol. i., 
pp. 176 and 193.) 

"Thus the belief in an unchanging order — the belief in law, now 
spreading among the more cultivated throughout the civilized world, 
is a belief of which the primitive man is absolutely incapable. He 
is unable even to think of a single law, much less of law in general." 
— Herbert Spencer, Princ. of Psychology, § 48S. 

XXXIX [ 16 ] 



THE HOPE 

VI. The sciences of animal physiology, botany, and medicine ; 
the microscope in connection therewith ; the discovery of the cir- 
culation of the blood ; of the functions of the brain and nervous 
system; the laws of health and the nature and cause of disease. 
The omnipresent activity and importance of bacteria, with all 
that is understood as sanitary science ; the latter having had im- 
mense influence on the art of surgery, and enormously increas- 
ing the service it is capable of rendering to suffering humanity. 

VII. Man's knowledge of the condition of the earth and of 
its inhabitants in prehistoric time, as learned by palaeontological 
research, i.e., the discovery of the remains of animals which 
lived many thousands or even millions of years ago, and found 
in stratiiicd deposits far below the present surface. A science 
at present in its infancy, so small a portion of the earth's crust 
having been yet explored. 



PART II 

I have now finished that part of my work which has been 
devoted to the object of demonstrating two important statements: 

First, that Man has, throughout a long and very gradual 
course of development from his pre-historic origin, acquired all 
his stores of natural knowledge — in its widest sense — solely by 
his own unaided efforts. 

Secondly, that the authenticity of the ancient records, existing 
in several parts of the world, made at different periods of his 
history, and regarded as supernatural or "divinely" revealed, 
respecting the origin of the entire universe, especially that of 
the earth, including man himself and his duties to an alleged 
Creator, and asserting the existence of a future endless state 
of rewards and punishments for every individual after death, 
has never been substantiated, and is in fact unsupported by 
evidence. 

VII 

I now arrive at the interesting and important stage of our 
inquiry: What does our survey of man's history and ex- 
XXXIX [ 17 ] 



THE HOPE 

perience, and of his rclatilR to the phenomena of nature, 
teach us respecting the Tendencies, Disposition, and Purpose 
— if permitted to use terms suggested by purely human feehngs 
and ideas to convey a meaning which cannot be other^vise ex- 
pressed — manifested by that "Infinite and Eternal Energy" 
from which all things proceed? This incjuiry has exercised 
the minds of many; nay more, has been an absorbing study 
for the thinking part of mankind from very early times to the 
the present. Hypotheses and speculations innumerable, some 
of which were at first crude and obviously untenable, need 
not be referred to further now. The fact which alone con- 
cerns us here is, that they evince the existence of a deep in- 
terest in an all-prevading desire to solve, if possible, the mighty 
problem here presented. 

I declare my firm belief, and desire to repeat it, that one 
method alone can throw light on the subject, viz., a studious 
observation of the facts of nature and of the inferences which may 
be legitimately drawn from them. 

I shall consider what we may thus attempt to discover re- 
specting the "Source of Infinite and Eternal Energy" under 
three heads, regarding each as a form of its manifestation, viz.: 
I. Infinite Power. 
II. Infinite Knowledge. 

III. Tendencies or Disposition. 

I. Power; beyond man's faculties to grasp or comprehend. 
Eternal and all-pervading, therefore ever-present, wherever we 
may be, at every instant of our lives. In a certain sense by no 
means invisible, for its working is everywhere around us and with- 
in us, in every molecule of our bodies; in the curiously and beauti- 
fully arranged adaptations, not yet half discovered, by which we 
come into contact with external nature — the "not our self" — 
which meets us everywhere. Let me repeat that it is a fact be- 
yond controversy, always to be borne in mind, that Man is the 
most finished product known on earth of "Nature's" work — 
that is, which has resulted from the "Infinite and Eternal En- 
ergy"; the noblest and completest manifestation, so to speak, of 
the "divine afiiatus"— the "Temple of the Holy Ghost" in 
ancient language, used with undesigned prophetic purview 
xxxix [ i8 ] 



THE HOPE 

in times when men were ignorant of Nature's laws, and when 
faith in the Invisible must necessarily suffice for their needs, 
until discovery of scientific methods had revealed the existence 
of hitherto unknown powers within and around us; facts in 
place of fables. Then much which was formerly invisible is 
now visible; and we might adopt for ourselves the old expressive 
but mystic saying of "the Master," "Behold the kingdom of 
God is within you." 

II. Infinite Knowledge and Intelligence. — We possess 
no language adequate to express what must be the deep con- 
viction of all religious persons— and even of men in general, if 
they consider the question— respecting this subject. By far 
the greater part of the present essay has been really devoted 
to illustrating the transcendent Intelligence which has ordered 
the organization of the Universe, so far as we know and are 
able to understand it; and I have no stronger terms in which 
to express admiration. Nothing then remains but to bow in 
humility, and confess in the words of the Hebrew poet, "Such 
knowledge is too wonderful for me : it is high, I cannot attain 
unto it" (Ps. cxxxix. v. 6). 

III.— The third and last subject of inquiry is, What can 
we rightly infer relatively to the Tendencies, Disposition 
OR Purpose^ of the unknown "Source of Infinite and Eternal 
Energy from which all things proceed " ? 

I shall first revert to the unquestionable fact, on which I laid 
so much stress, and so fully illustrated at the commencement, 
of the history of Man's career and progress in this world— that 
it had been accomplished solely by "his own unaided efforts." 

For it constitutes the most important fact in his history; 
and is for me a signal illustration not only of the wisdom but 
especially of the beneficence of the great Source we are study- 
ing. Nevertheless, the first and most natural feeling suggested 
by a survey of that long and difficult course which man has trav- 
ersed through countless ages, may be for many one of pity — 
with a sense of regret that, had it been possible, aid should not 

'Applying these terms as we should to the action of human 
beings; an analogy which must be permitted to Man's limited means 
of expression. 

XXXIX [ 19 ] 



THE HOPE 

now and then have been pi^ercd, perhaps at certain turning 
points in his history, when apparently it would have been 
greatly serviceable. And not a few have expressed inability to 
believe in the beneficent tendencies of the Unknown Source of 
all power, and have inferred evidence of neglect, or of indif- 
ference, in regard to man's progress and welfare. 

But, on the other hand, it is next to certain that had the 
human race received at any time a revelation, say, of the means 
of obtaining fire, or of the elements of agriculture, or of the 
means of obtaining complete relief from suffering which modern 
science has discovered, man would never have become the ef- 
ficient and highly endowed creature he is. He has fought his 
own way throughout, has overcome every obstacle himself, and 
passed through an educational course of the most perfect 
kind — self-taught, not "helped." 

The result of this survey of man's long struggle with the 
forces of Nature, so often apparently hostile, but which he has 
so completely dominated and rendered subservient to his will 
and conducive to his well-being, has, I beheve, established a 
fact which affords a complete and decisive proof of the beneficent 
tendency exercised by the Source of the Infinite and Eternal 
Energy. 

Nevertheless, doubt as to the existence of that beneficence 
has arisen in some minds from the fact that life mostly entails 
the endurance of so much pain and misery as to invalidate the 
grounds for that belief. I reply that life is universally regarded 
as a precious possession, and is enjoyed — in different degrees — 
by every individual in the entire animal creation; not one will 
part with its share without a struggle, if it has the power to de- 
fend itself. The universal sentiment of Humanity is — "Skin 
for (upon) skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life." 

VIII 

I shall next present, in a tabular form, the following state- 
ments derived from that knowledge of natural history which is 
common to all, reciting the chief sources of pleasure or happiness 
possessed by the animal creation. 

XXXIX [ 20 ] 



THE HOPE 



1. Enjoyment of Food through the senses 

of taste and smell. 

2. Acquirement of Power by growth, and the 

enlarged experience which it brings. 

3. The relations of love between the sexes. 

4. Social relations with others — Friendship. 

5. Appreciation of beauty — through the 

eye, of color, fonn — as presented in 
Man and especially in Woman. The 
chann of landscape, the cultivation of 
flowers (scents) and fruit; the garden. 
Impressions derived from grand sce- 
nery in all parts of the world — the 
pleasure of travel by land and sea. 

6. Delight from Musical Art, through the ear. 

7. The pleasure of Possession. 

8. The Practice of Art in all its branches. 

9. The Pursuit of Knowledge; acquisition of 

new facts — discovery in every depart- 
ment of life. 

10. The pleasure derived from the exercise of 

Charity, from moral conduct, and in 
the exercise of the religious sentiment 
natural to Man, and already observed 
throughout all his history; becoming 
gradually developed and modified as 
he increases in his acquaintance with 
Nature, in the widest sense of the 
. term, and in his power of reasoning 
from the facts thus acquired. 



Enjoyed by the en- 
tire animal series, 
from the lowest 
conscious forms to 
the highest. 



Chiefly exemplified 
in Man, but em- 
bracing in a less 
degree some lower 
animals. 



To Man only. 



By the long process of Man's evolution, ethical rules have 
been evolved. Men have learned that it was not only wise, but 
productive of satisfaction and often of pleasure, "To do unto 
others as you would they should do unto you " ; that honesty was 
not only the best policy, but desirable for the reason just given. 
Thus it is that the "golden rule" has been enunciated in almost 
identical terms by the sages of other civilizations, even before 
the time of Christ. A code of morals has resulted by degrees as 
man himself has progressed, and is not the product of any super- 
natural revelation; a code which not only sets forth man's 
duties, but necessarily implies the existence of punitive conse- 
quences on any neglect of its articles. For due consideration 
XXXIX [ 21 ] 



THE HOPE 

will render clear the fact liRt every breach of Nature's laws, 
whether physical or moral, certainly brings with it punishment 
in this life, sooner or later. For example, the man who merely 
consumes improper food or drink, or takes more than he can 
digest, pays the penalty which the error entails. Again, if 
he exerts his strength far beyond his powers, as in athletic con- 
tests, etc., he runs great risk of injuring his heart and of damag- 
ing his constitution as the result ; one indeed too often met with. 
If he wastes his health and strength in debauchery, his punish- 
ment often speedily arrives, involving disease and shortened 
life, that possession which every sane man prizes above all 
other. So with every breach of moral law; any unjust act 
committed equally involves its penalty in this life. It brings 
long and bitter remorse in generous natures; in others, it surely 
tends to debase the individual; he becomes habituated to dis- 
honorable designs and acts, and sinks lower in the scale of 
morality, until he loses self-respect, that of others, and at last 
is trusted by none. No doubt an unprincipled man may have 
a successful career, but his punishment surely arrives after a 
time. On the other hand, in every department of life unblem- 
ished character is the highest attainment ; whatever of talent or 
of genius a man may display, he who has been proved by a past 
career to be a possessor of that, is the most valued and esteemed 
in any rank or condition of life, and is the most certain to se- 
cure success in the long run. 

To the foregoing let me add a quotation here, and ask at- 
tention to it, in which these sentiments are tersely and beauti- 
fully expressed by an ancient Hebrew poet, whose religious 
creed, let it he remembered, ignored any scheme oj rewards and 
punishments in a future life, Psalm xxxvii., vv. 35-37: "I 
have seen the wdcked in great power, and spreading himself 
like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not : 
yea, I sought him, but he could not be found. Mark the 
perfect man, and behold the upright ; for the end of that man is 
peace." 

I shall conclude this section by simply observing that the 
religion of Nature, the laws of which and their working have 
thus been briefly illustrated, and which is based upon the de- 
XXXIX [ 22 ] 



THE HOPE 

termination not to believe anything which is not supported by 
indubitable evidence, must eventually become the faith of the 
future: its reception is a question for each man's personal con- 
victions. It is one in which a priestly hierarchy has no place, 
nor are there any specified formularies of worship. For, "Re- 
ligion ought to mean simply reverence and love for the Ethical 
ideal, and the desire to realize that ideal in life" (Huxley).^ 

IX 

The facts of suffering and death which affect mankind — 
the former mostly, the latter universally — have been urged by 
many as incompatible with the attribution of goodness and 
benevolence to the Author of the Universe. 

I shall first consider the last-named inevitable event, which 
each one of us must encounter. And I shall venture to state, 
as the known result of long and careful observation of the 
phenomena which then occur, that a really painful death from 
disease is never witnessed. Whatever of suffering may have 
previously occurred, which I shall deal with after this, the act 
of death is believed to be always preceded by a considerable 
period of insensibility. There may often be obvious automatic 
movements, not felt by the subject of them, but naturally dis- 
tressing to bystanders, because resembling those of pain. 

Acute and sometimes long-continued sufferings precede 
death, it may be for periods of considerable duration, sometimes 
for years. But thanks to man's scientific researches, especially 
to one of the most recent, the inhalation of anaesthetic vapors, 
all acute sufferings can be completely avoided. What untold 
and agonizing tortures would have been spared throughout his 
long history had this precious secret been revealed! How 
evident it is that "Revelation" was no part 0} the plan. In the 

^Huxley's Collected Works, vol. v., p. 249. Vide also the follow- 
ing extract bearing on this subject: "There is a striking expression 
of Piderot's that all Revealed or National religions are only per- 
versions of the Religion of Nature; and it is true, if the words Religion 
of Nature be taken in the highest sense." — Extracts from a letter by 
Jowett to Professor Caird, Life of Jowctt, vol. i., p. 445. 
XXXIX [ 23 ] 



l^HE HOPE 

course of most chronic dis(^Rcs it is well known that some form 
of anodyne, of which several notable examples exist, can almost 
always be utilized so as to avoid severe suffering. No man 
should be a martyr to pain who can obtain a tolerably skilful 
medical attendant; and such are provided in all the public in- 
stitutions for the care of the poor, or at the hospitals which 
abound in London, and exist in almost every small country 
town. 

The sufferings of the lower animals are very far less than 
those of man. The sense of pain corresponds with the extent or 
the development of the nervous system; and this is extremely 
small among countless species of active living beings, e.g., the 
insects — flying, creeping, or jumping — and furnishing a popula- 
tion far exceeding the sum total of the human inhabitants of the 
globe on any five acres of cultivated land, to say nothing of the 
inhabitants of the waters which wash our sea-coasts. Among 
insects may perhaps be partially excepted those which form 
social communities, as the ants, bees, wasps, etc., who have 
highly developed instincts, and concerning whose possession of 
some degree of consciousness it is impossible to speak with 
certainty. Shakespeare greatly erred when he said that the 
poor beetle we tread upon feels a pang as great as when a giant 
dies. Like ancient authors of all time, he could, when deal- 
ing with natural history, only reflect the knowledge of his age. 
His insight into human character, and his knowledge of the 
human heart, have never perhaps been surpassed by any, and 
his mastery in expressing thought has made him a poet for all 
time. Similar qualities existing, more or less, among some 
of the poets and prophets of the Hebrew race give their pro- 
ductions a high value in no way lessened by the fact that they 
were ignorant, when writing, of the earth and its origin, and of 
its relation to the rest of the universe. 

It is impossible to state with certainty what amount of 
consciousness is present throughout the numerous species of 
animals which rank below the vertebrate series, but there is 
certainly ground for believing that they are incapable of suffer- 
ing much pain, and that even the fierce carnivora inflict lit- 
tle or none in the act of killing their prey, although belonging 
xxxrx [ 24 ] 



THE HOPE 

to the same order. For all are led by what is called instinct — 
probably inherited habit — to seize their victim at a vital spot, 
as by the neck, at the top of the spinal cord, which mostly de- 
stroys the power of movement and of sensation, of course in 
order to prevent struggles or acts of retaliation when possible. 

Some of the higher vertebrata, especially those who have 
long held intimate associations with man, have had their in- 
telligence and emotional powers much developed; for tv/o 
obvious examples take the dog and the horse. Such are sus- 
ceptible to pain and suffer much, and when inflicted, either by 
accident or design, should invariably be relieved, when possible, 
by the same anaesthetics employed for man. 

There is another consideration supporting the view here 
taken of the beneficent tendency of the great but unknown 
Source of Infinite Energy, not to be overlooked. Granting this 
view to be correct, it is impossible not to believe that the in- 
fiuence of the Supreme Source must not merely equal, but greatly 
transcend any like or analogous quality — such as care, com- 
passion, or kindness — which man can and does very largely 
exercise toward his fellows or dependents, all like himself 
having derived their being and its inherent qualities from that 
same Energy which pervades the universe. 

X 

Finally the cultivated and truly religious man finds his 
greatest happiness in the active and healthy exercise of all his 
functions — moral, intellectual, and physical. He is careful to 
promote the welfare of his fellow- creatures, not merely by works 
of charity but by enabling them to help themselves, and ex- 
ercises his judgment to that end. Whatever he does it is his 
aim to attain the best result possible, and thus to make the most 
of the priceless boon of life. His religious feelings do not sug- 
gest to him the validity of the Christian practice of prayer 
to a Deity for gifts of any kind, even for the purpose of obtain- 
ing moral or mental improvement, nor for the recovery of the 
sick or protection from personal dangers, etc. — a practice 
which is so common — well knowing that all events must follow 
XXXIX [ 25 ] 



THE HOPE 

the laws of nature, which ai^^nakcrablc. No doubt the act of 
prayer, on the part of one who beheves in its power to move the 
Deity to bestow a precious boon, brings consolation to the feel- 
ings of the applicant. It is a spiritual sedative which affords 
indescribable relief and enjoyment to many. Nevertheless, 
"Thy will, not mine be done," is the only prayer of the truly 
sensible Christian, and he may be grateful indeed that no other 
prayer can be acceptable. What a chaos would the world 
present if short-sighted men could interfere with the working 
of the laws which determine the course of events! For the 
religious man here described, adoration of the grandeur and 
of the beneficence which pervade the universe is the only senti- 
ment suitable for public or for private religious service. "Lord, 
how manifold are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them 
all" (Ps. civ., v. 24), expresses the same sentiment in the lan- 
guage of the Hebrew poet, in terms suitable to his day. 

1 o conclude, he is grateful, yet proud to feel himself a par- 
ticipant in the great and endless procession of the wise and 
good throughout the ages; trustful, without shadow of a doubt 
respecting any kind of future there may be in store, and con- 
cerning which it is needless for him to inquire or speculate. 
He "lives a life of Faith" in the Source of the Infinite and 
Eternal Energy, confident in the knowledge that the laws of the 
Universe are the outcome of perfect Wisdom and Beneficence. 
The old Faiths, founded on so-called "revelation, "have long been 
tested and are found wanting, and a natural religion will ulti- 
mately replace them. It is no part of this inquiry to dilate on 
what this comprehends. It is sufficiently defined in few and 
simple words at page 23 and note. 

But it is not to be forgotten that a large proportion of the 
population in all Christian countries is ignorant of, or indifferent 
to, the subject of religious belief, unless tl>e formal compliance 
with a certain slight ceremonial is considered to be religious 
worship. Concerning these it is not necessary to speak. On 
the other hand I have no desire to disturb the beliefs of those 
who derive comfort from the hope of a happy future in another 
world, and a motive for well-doing in this, which they derive 
from the Christian faith. It is especially undesirable to do so 
XXXIX [ 26 ] 



THE HOPE 

in relation to the poor and uneducated, whose lot is mitigated 
thereby, and also to those who, possessing an ordinary share 
of intelligence, have confidently and happily rested on its hopes 
and promises for many past years. 

I now close this essay, the materials for which in the shape 
of sundry notes I began to collect upward of 'twenty years ago. 
Others were frequently added, as I pondered much and often 
over what has long been a favorite theme, and it was not until 
a few years later that I copied into my note-book, on its first 
appearance in 1884, that striking passage from Herbert Spencer 
which is now quoted as a motto on the title-page. This indeed 
suggested the subject, respecting which, as it appeared to me, 
systematic research might be not only practicable, but might 
also be expected to yield some definite results. 

I commenced my task solely for the purpose of seeking the 
truth for my own personal needs and enlightenment, incited 
thereto by the numerous and conflicting claims of the various 
sects, some diametrically opposed to each other, into which what 
is termed "Christianity" is divided. The original paper was 
written without any intention that it should be seen by any other 
eye than my own ; nor has it been so seen until, having been con- 
siderably amplified, I submitted it to the judgment of a friend 
during the past year. For myself it has been a veritable "Pil- 
grim's Progress." The title, together with the form of the 
essay as it now stands, has been the result of the whole in- 
quiry, and was not a predetermined intention. 

I am now approaching the end, and find myself compelled 
to arrive at a conclusion, contrary, I gladly confess, to that 
which I at first entertained when engaged with the former part 
of the inquiry, and depressed by mentally realizing the miseries 
and hardships to which Man was exposed during the tardy de- 
velopment for unknown ages of what may be deemed the infancy 
and childhood of the race : a career which will probably continue 
many ages more before he approaches maturity. 

But when that long inquiry came to an end, and not until 
then, the Truth — as I profoundly believe it to be — almost 
suddenly impressed me: to wit, that interference of a super- 
natural kind with man's doings (supposing its exercise to be pos- 
XXXIX [ 27 ] 



THE HOPE 

sible within the limits of the great scheme of Nature) would have 
marred, if it did not arrest, the course of that development 
which has issued in the remarkable progress he has made, es- 
pecially during the last three centuries. 

I was now assured, by evidence which I could not resist, that 
all which man — with his limited knowledge and experience — 
has learned to regard as due to Supreme "Power" and "Wis- 
dom," although immeasurably beyond his comprehension, is 
also associated with the exercise of an "Absolutely Benefi- 
cent" influence over all living things, of every grade, which 
exist within its range. 

And the result of my labor has at least brought me its own 
reward, by conferring emancipation from the fetters of all the 
creeds, and unshakable confidence in the Power, the Wisdom, 
and the Beneficence which pervade and rule the Universe. 

Finally, let me add that no one can feel more forcibly than 
myself that the foregoing pages ofifer only a very slight sketch 
of a most extensive and important subject. It is but a syllabus 
thereof, and in this sense I venture to offer it to the consideration 
of my readers. Moreover, I desire to state my belief that the 
subject of this paper, "The Unknown God"? may be regarded 
as in progress of solution by following the process suggested, 
and that "the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things 
proceed" will not ever remain wholly unknown or "unknow- 
able," but may be still further elucidated as human faculties be- 
come highly developed in the progress of time, and rendered 
capable of receiving additional enlightenment respecting it. 



XXXIX [ 28 ] 



XL 



OUR GOAL 



"THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL SPIRIT" 

BY 

EDWIN A. ALDERMAN 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 

AND 

"EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY" 

BY 

GEORGE HARRIS 

PRESIDENT OP AMHERST COLLEGE 



TIT' HAT then is the meaning, what the purpose, we have 
discovered in modern life? We have sought to glance 
over the whole broad field of human thought and human endeavor, 
to summon at each turning 0} the road the voice of some master 
spirit to direct and inform our jeebler knowledge. One would 
fain sum up the final result in a jew simple words such as a 
child might understand. But, alas, no such simple answer to 
the problem has as yet become clear to all men. Here and there 
we find the enthusiast who believes he has solved all difficulties 
with a single potent word; but to most of us the meaning of 
life seems manifold, and its purpose, if that may indeed be 
expressed by a single term, must find expression in organ tones 
as yet too vast for human tongue. 

Some effort, however, we can make toward understanding. 
Some effort we offer here in two remarkable speeches, delivered 
on notable occasions by two of our leading college presidents. 
At the last annual meeting of the New York Chamber of Com- 
merce, its one hundred and thirty-seventh anniversary dinner, the 
speech of the evening by President Alderman, D.C.L., LL.D., 
of the University of Virginia, was upon the future of our Ameri- 
can race, ^' the making of a national spirit.''^ By Dr. Alderman^s 
permission we print it here entire, except for one section in which 
XL [i] 



OUR GOAL 

he turns aside to refer to his beloved South. The address must 
be read oj course in the mood in which it was delivered to the 
eminent business leaders who sat listening; yet it manages to 
tell, with no uncertain note, high truths both brave and proud as 
to the progress and the spirit oj our nation. 

We present also the address made by President Harris, LL.D., 
of Amherst, on tJie occasion 0} his inauguration as head oj his 
college. Some portions oj this noteworthy speech were, oj 
necessity, personal to the occasion; these we have, with Dr. 
Harrises consent, omitted. The main address was, however, 
general, an analysis oj lije and its needs to-day. Conjronting 
tJie reader with this thoughtjul, comprehensive view, we shall 
leave him to answer jor himselj, in accord with his own hopes, 
his wisdom, and his jortunes, '^the meaning oj modern lije.'" 

I APPRECIATE, as a teacher, the privilege of speaking to this 
ancient and powerful Chamber of Commerce of the State of 
New York at a moment when I do think it not assembled 
to discuss commerce alone, or to scan the balance of trade, 
but to discern the movement of the national spirit and to con- 
tribute to the health and strength of the national conscious- 
ness and character. 

The speakers of the olden days proudly called you mer- 
chants, as they called my tribe schoolmasters and teachers. 
Now they call us — and a palatable brand of cracker — edu- 
cators, and they call you names — largely — plutocrats and 
magnates, oligarchs, and other jagged-looking epithets. Other 
points of likeness between the schoolmaster and the merchant 
encourage me in the effort to make this speech, which I do 
not mean to be hortatory, for I agree with Charles Lamb that 
it is difficult to feel quite at ease with a schoolmaster, because 
he comes, like Gulliver, from among his young folks, and 
cannot easily adjust the stature of his understanding. 

What we call business and stupidly think of as a coarse 
material machine is really the great cosmic university, to 
which nine-tenths of human beings go to learn truth-speaking 
— though they do not always learn it — and faith in men, and 
so prove themselves by suffering and service. What we call 
XL [2] 



OUR GOAL 

trade is a great university-extension scheme for civilizing and 
keeping the peace among nations. The teacher inculcates 
ideals, and the merchant incarnates them for good or ill to 
this generation. An unfaithful merchant indicates social dis- 
ease as surely as and more vividly than an immoral school- 
master, for the master rules of both are fidelity, truth, and 
honor. The rewards and the power of both are great. The 
merchant's reward, if he be of intelligent mind, rich in social 
sympathy, far-seeing in conception, is above the valor of the 
soldier or the opportunity of the statesman in this modern 
world. The schoolmaster's reward sometimes comes too late 
to sweeten the toil of his day, and is of a kind not greatly 
molested by thieves or rust, or even the most absent-minded 
of moths. But it has some infinite satisfactions, and its power 
is simply symbolized by some cultivated, clean, and fearless \ 
youth ready for life and fit to illustrate the majesty of repub- 
lican citizenship. 

I, therefore, do not think of you this evening as great mag- 
nates, or as the "beaked and taloned graspers of the world," 
as some one has gently called you, but as my fellow- crafts- 
men, as plain, extraordinary men, whose proudest fortune is 
the legacv of American opportunity and citizenship, and whose 
proudest achievement will be to hand down that inheritance 
untarnished and undiminished. 

It is fairly difficult these days to make a speech without 
mentioning Wall Street. I will begin pleasantly by saying 
that Wall Street is bracketed with Gehenna as a sort of sym- 
bol of sin in the minds of many good people. That is prob- 
ably going too far. The reflection that its giant activities are 
grounded on faith and integrity and credit gives even to it and 
its fellow-sinners, Lombard and State Streets, a certain aspect 
of goodness, and, considering all things, increases my pride 
in the essential dignity of the race. Sometimes I go down 
there, impelled by that wonder which Plato called the beginning 
of knowledge. I seldom stay long, for the atmosphere leaves 
something to be desired in the way of academic peace, and 
enables a mere human to understand the psychology of the 
lamb. But I do not come away ever without stopping for a 
XL [3] 



OUR GOAL 

look at the finest thing (lo\^i there — the regnant figure of an 
old Virginia country gentleman, who was the richest man and 
the most public-spirited citizen of a simple age, standing upon 
the steps of the Sub-Treasury Building, looking out with 
honest, fearless eyes over that sea of hurrying men. That 
statue is the most remarkable allegory that ever got placed, 
by historic chance, at just the right spot in the history of the 
world, and points forward surely to the higher social order, 
when the Place Vendomes and Trafalgar Squares of the world 
will celebrate the glory of the great citizen. My speech is 
not going to wander far from that statue. 

The conviction in the heart of George Washington that 
enabled him to be the richest man and the most public-spirited 
citizen of his time, this same conviction in the hearts of men in 
this Chamber, and everywhere in this nation, that enables 
them to be something of both, is the conviction with enough 
strength in it, if it be a conviction and not a spasmodic emo- 
tion, to carry this democratic experiment past a very serious 
peril. It is, therefore, pertinent to know what the conviction 
is, and to ask further if it can be reinf used in manly fashion into 
our republican life. Briefly put, it was the belief that a re- 
public is the final form of human society, and the common 
I individual man the sublimest asset of the world, that power 
' rests on fitness to rule, that the sole object of power is the 
public good, and that service to the republic is a glory quite 
sufficient in itself. 

To Washington these ideas had a religious sanction, for 
they were in the air of an age of moral imagination and superb 
human enthusiasm which counted the dual standard for private 
and for public life as the essence of republican treason. These 
ideas had the force of religious sanction, too, to Jay and Hamil- 
ton and Clinton, whose figures adorn your building down 
town, and one cannot look into St. Gaudcns's face of Lincoln 
in Chicago, with its commonness and plainness, and yet 
with its sublimity and gentleness, without seeing those ideas 
shining there, revealing the real glory of that great common 
man, and teaching through that melancholy world-face the 
whole splendid rise of man to soul and mind and will. That 
XL [4] 



OUR GOAL 

noble and pathetic scene at Newburg, when Washington put 
aside all ambition, was not hard for him, and he probably 
did not realize what a type of self-effacement Newburg would 
become because of it. A century of trial has somewhat dulled 
the halo about democracy to fools and those of little faith, though 
the great optimism has abated sectarian fury, abolished legal 
slavery, protected and enlarged manhood suffrage, mitigated 
much social injustice, increased kindness and gentleness, 
preserved the form of the Union, conquered its wildernesses, 
developed great agencies of culture, and made it a S3Tnbol 
of prosperity. 

But it has also developed new and hateful masters in politics 
and new shapes of temptation and wrong-doing, and after a 
generation of amazing constructive effort, without sufficient 
leisure for ethical considerations, it is in danger of its own 
strength, and it must protect itself with its own strength. 
I am not railing against great constructive forces, or uttering 
cheap prophecies of damnation, or doubting that the future 
will be an industrial world, which means a republican world. 
I am simply claiming that democracy, like a man's character, 
is never out of danger. It is not selfishness or corruption 
alone which we have to fear, for we have vanquished these 
before, but as much the temper of despair and faithlessness 
which blinds the eyes of the youth to the heroic simplicity 
and love of freedom at the heart of the American people. 
And my concern is for youth, for the grown folks are generally \ 
past saving. The chief weapon of the protective strength 
of democracy I conceive to be the acceptance of the Wash- 
ington type of public spirit as a working form of patriotism 
upon as large a scale in the social and political order as the 
instinct for co-operation and combination has been accepted 
in the industrial world. By the measure in which United 
States Steel surpasses the blacksmith's shop in efficiency, by 
the measure in which municipal government surpasses the 
rural township in complexity of politics — in that measure 
must both politics and business cease to be regarded as a game 
or as war, or as a fixed code, or as a treasure-trove, and come 
XL [ 5 ] 



OUR GOAL 

to be thought of as a jhitoc function, as a public trust, not 
only in method and organi/.ation, but in moral responsibility. 
Docs this involve a moral miracle, or an utter change in human 
nature, or a surrender of democracy to state socialism or some 
other order? It certainly involves the reaffirmation of the 
founder's idea of public spirit as a dominant national motive 
and as a sort of inner well-spring of conduct, in place of the 
idea of headlong strength and achievement and speed, follow- 
ing, as a sort of spiritual corrective, the gigantic system of 
modern business, and the new brood of political conditions 
with which neither statute law nor public morals have been 
able to keep pace. In short, as an industrial democracy has 
carried to high efficiency a new philosophy of business and 
politics, so it must reaffirm and reincarnate its old philosophy 
of citizenship and patriotism. 

Patriotism, therefore, which is hard to define and new 
with every age, must redefine itself. It meant manhood rights 
when Washington took it to his heart, as it means to the Rus- 
sian to-day. It meant culture and refinement and mental 
distinction when Emerson, in his Phi Beta Kappa address, 
"besought the sluggish intellect of his country to look up from 
under its iron lids." It signified ideals and theories of govern- 
ment to the soldiers of Grant and Lee. It meant industrial 
greatness and splendid desires to annex nature to man's uses 
when the great leaders of the generation, whose statesman- 
ship and imagination no man will deny, built up their busi- 
ness and tied the Union together in a unity of steel and steam. 

To-day it means a vast reaction from an unsocial and 
predatory individualism to self-restraint and consideration for 
the general welfare, expressing itself in a cry for fairness and 
honor and sympathy in use of power and wealth, as the states 
of spirit and mind that alone can safeguard republican ideals. 

If in our youth and breathlessness there has grown up a 
spreading insanity of desire for quick wealth and a theory of 
life in lesser minds that esteems money as everything, and 
therefore is willing to do everything for money, that very fact 
lias served to define the patriotic duty and mood of the public 
XL [6] 



OUR GOAL 

mind. And is not tlie theory of our overlooking special Provi- 
dence borne out in the fact that, as in the period seeking to 
estabHsh manhood rights there stood forth at the head of 
the government the figure of Washington, a repubhcan saint 
around wliom a young nation should rally, so now in a period 
pausing to search its heart, after a certain madness of spirit, 
there stands forth the figure of a bold prophet of common 
righteousness and common service and common decency 
strong enough to be everywhere, and sincere enough and un- 
conscious enough to preach his doctrine in a thousand voices? 
This reawakened patriotism of the common good has the ad- 
vantage of appeal to a young public conscience not yet un- 
balanced by hysteria, and of being supported by a valid and 
unauthoritative public opinion, not yet dulled by content- 
ment. Sound public conscience and valid public opinion are 
the last unbreached strongholds of our old democracy. In 
proof of their soundness and authority I claim that if there 
be a man in America to-day who has an unjust fortune, and a 
pagan ideal of its use, he will not bask as cosily in the respect 
of his fellows, nor have as much fun, as Croesus or Louis XIV. 
The gift of one hundred and seven millions of dollars in one 
year by private individuals to the general welfare, a colossal 
development of the sense of social obhgation barely dreamed 
of by Washington, is the testimony on the affirmative side of 
this opinion. A servant of the people, in city or state, who 
is afield for exploitation rather than service is not as highly 
honored a man as was Robert Walpole, or Warren Hastings, 
or Aaron Burr, as the roll-call of some prison houses will 
show. The disposition which democracy has just shown, at 
the most inconvenient moment, to ask the powers that be 
whether they are the powers that ought to be, in Mr. Lowell's 
phrase, and the answer to the question, are the testimonies 
on the affirmative side of that opinion. Plain people, it is 
true, are not as awestruck at the names of the powerful as 
they once were, but one may note a growing ability to render 
awe where awe is due, which is a beautiful growth in dis- 
cernment. In a nobler, truer light shine for the people of 
America the names of those upright souls, in business and 
XL [7] 



OUR GOAL 

p> II Lies, in this Chamber dii out of it, who have held true in 
a heady time, who have kept quick and human their popular 
sympathies and their republican ideals, and, by so doing, have 
kept sweet their country's fame. 

What is the influence of the schools and the universities, 
the public conscience and public opinion, in this ever new 
remoulding of the national spirit? These schools and uni- 
versities have been changing their form from simplicity to 
power under the pressure of this same era of passionate strength, 
and educational ideals are more often the result of social press- 
ure than social ideals are the result of educational direction. 
What are the results? I claim this much for the schools: 
they are to-day more helpfully related to the public life of 
states and cities than ever before. They are closer to the needs 
of that body who are neither rich nor poor, and upon whom 
rests the solution of our problems. They are producing more 
abundantly and scattering more widely the results of their 
production. They speak with the authority of knowledge. 
The same protest of our time has therefore come out of them. 
The scholarship in them, neither radical nor subservient, is 
thoroughly permeated with a sense of public spirit and in- 
formed with a note of hopefulness and seriousness and old- 
fashioned belief in the mission of the republic. To be sure, 
this scholarship is not mere goodness, for untrained good- 
ness does not count for much in this world, whatever may be 
its felicities in the next; but it is scholarship that cannot be 
frightened, because it is capable, and cannot be corrupted, 
j; because it is fortified with faith and ideals; and it is unweakened 
' by cynicism or despair, because it is made possible by the 
beneficence of the individual and the capacity of states. There- 
fore, I reckon, as Mr. Bryce did, that the most helpful aspect 
of the republic is the spectacle of the schools and colleges 
struggling to fashion the right sort of an American, tempting 
the rich to service, conveying to states the idea of civic duty, 
preserving the great popular heart from envy and hatred, 
and establishing a standard where men may repair and make 
a stand for the eternal values. 

XL [8] 



OUR GOAL 



'^"EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY" ^ 



BY 

GEORGE HARRIS 

The objects and methods of education engage the atten- 
tion of thinking people at the present time as never before. 
This great interest was left, until lately, to professional edu- 
cators, while the people were comparatively indifferent, but 
now it is a theme of discuss'on in magazines and newspapers, 
on the platform and in conversation. All the way through, 
from kindergarten to professional school, the aims of educa- 
tion are undergoing severe scrutiny. The college does not 
escape, but is required to give an account of itself in justifica- 
tion of its achievements and in ready adaptation to the instruc- 
tion of all who are entitled to the advantages of liberal culture. 
The decisive question is the question of fitness, which the 
college as truly as the grammar school must answer. Fitness 
for what? Education is a means to an end. What end? 
Since, directly or indirectly, the people are taxed for the sup- 
port of the college, since the college is a public institution, a 
liberal education should prepare men for service in society, 
for citizenship in the free state. The subject, therefore, to 
which, without further preface, I invite your attention is "The 
Man of Letters in a Democracy." The function of culti- 
vated men in the modern state determines the aims and methods 
of their education. Every question of the college concerning 
choice of studies, modes of instruction, physical culture, and 
religious Hfe must be answered in view of the function of the 
man of letters in a democracy. He is not always successful 
in finding his place, nor, indeed, in finding any place among 
the people. Yet no man is capable of rendering greater ser- 
XL [9] 



OUR GOAL 

vice, and therefore of si#Riining greater obligation to the 
state, than the man of letters. 

A few axioms, briefly stated, define democracy. It is 
more than a form of government, since it exists under various 
forms of government. The function of the citizen involves 
more than voting and holding office, although these duties 
are important. Every value of Hfe is included in the state, 
or, better, all values are co-ordinated in the state. For democ- 
racy maintains and assures two things, freedom and justice. 
To every man his right — that is justice. It also is freedom. 
Every man, therefore, must defend the right of every other 
man, must see to it that his own objects do not conflict with 
the righteous and rightful objects of others, for thus only can 
all have freedom with justice. The right of every man is this : 
that he should make the most and best of himself, that he 
should possess and enjoy all the values he is able to possess and 
enjoy. Hence the material, intellectual, domestic, aesthetic, moral, 
and religious values are included and are protected in democ- 
racy which insures justice and freedom to all and to each. 
The attainment of one man is more largely in this direction, 
of another in that, but the state guarantees the right of every 
man in that freedom which regards the right of others to possess 
and enjoy all the legitimate values of life. Democracy is 
the true individualism, for it regards every person as an end, 
never as a means or a tool. It makes for the well-being of 
each, and therefore guards every institution, the family, the 
school, the church, — protects every pursuit that creates values, 
from the material to the spiritual; in a word, is itself the insti- 
tute of justice and so of the freedom that is grounded in justice. 
Democracy is the true socialism, which is not paternahsm, 
but is self-government by which free individuals so regulate 
society — that is, regulate themselves — that each may have the 
utmost freedom that is compatible with the freedom of other 
individuals in attaining the values of personal and social life. 
These axioms, put concretely, mean bread winning and bread 
eating, that is, just economic conditions. They mean home 
and friendship, they mean science and art, they mean free 
religion, they mean the things the state does as a state — laws, 
XL [ lO ] 



OUR GOAL 

rules, courts, tariffs, taxes, expansion or limitation of terri- 
tory. In all these things, democracy protects and even helps 
every man in coming to his ovi^n. 

This is no other than the religious conception of society, 
or at least is largely included in the religious conception. It 
is not too much nor too little to say that Jesus came preaching 
and founding democracy — the true individualism and the true 
socialism — in which every human institution, interest, and ideal 
has its rightful place. He called it the kingdom of God, which 
is God's purpose for humanity seen in the moral order of his- 
tory as it has evolved, seen in the Christian ideal of personal 
worth and mutual service, seen in the kingdom of God on 
earth in which we are brothers one of another. Define the 
true democracy, then define the kingdom of God on earth; 
and you will find you have simply given two titles to the same 
thing. Find me the man who is making the most and the best 
of himself in such ways that others may do the same and you 
have found me the modern saint. 

I need not say that democracy has not yet in any state 
fully secured its object, but the social ideal of democracy is 
the divine order of humanity, and it is the duty of every one 
to promote that ideal; by criticism, by reform, by eternal 
vigilance; by intelligent voting, by active influence, by fra- 
ternity ; above all and through all, by acting his own part as 
the righteous citizen in the free state, making the most and the 
best of himself, making his pursuit contribute to the common 
weal and thus converting the actual into the ideal republic. 
Surely modern democracy, if this view of it is correct, is roomy 
enough even for the man of letters — especially for the man 
of letters. 

Three attitudes, now, may be taken toward the democracy 
in which we have our habitation. One attitude is withdrawal. 
One may insulate one's self from vital concern in the actual 
life of the people. Having an assured income provided by 
others, a man may devote himself to pleasure, to travel, to 
literary culture, putting himself practically out of relation to 
the world of human struggle and attainment. Religiously 
this was the monastic Hfc of the Middle Ages — out in the wilder- 
XL [ II ] 



OUR GOAL 

ness, out of the world. ^Phc gcnllcman of leisure leading a 
luxurious life is the secular monk. The literary dilettante 
is the intellectual or aesthetic monk. The pietist who would 
save his soul by not doing certain things is the modern reli- 
gious monk. 

The second attitude is the parasitic, or, even more strongly, 
the piratical. One may go into the democracy for what one 
can get out of it for one's self, looking on the existing order 
as an arrangement out of which something can be had for one's 
own comfort or pleasure. Such a one Avould exploit democ- 
racy for his own benefit and pay as light a tax as possible. 
The generations and contemporaries have established a society 
holding certain values, and the exploiter, like a thief in the 
night, breaks through and steals. The State saves him the 
trouble of maintaining a band of armed retainers. Laws and 
courts are good, for they protect him in his thieving. The 
army is at his back that he may till his vineyard and run his 
mill. The one maxim of the pirate in a democracy is, "My 
rights, your duties." 

The third attitude is the reciprocal. A man looks out on 
democracy and contributes to it, putting in as much as he takes 
out, or more, paying his full tax, making his pursuit part of 
a whole which is for good. He is a Christian citizen of the 
modern world. His maxim for at least half of his Ufe is, 
"Your rights, my duties." 

The man of letters, by whom I mean the man that is liberally 
educated, the cultivated man, for practical purposes the college 
man — although there are men of letters that never saw a college 
and college men that are uneducated — the man of letters is 
expected to take this last attitude of contributing his part in 
promoting the ends of democracy, putting in as much as he 
takes out. He has been loudly accused of taking the first 
attitude, of insulating himself from public affairs, or at best 
of holding aloof as an impractical critic of the order of things, 
of standing on the shore declaring with many gesticulations 
how the ship of state should be sailed, but never handling a 
tiller or pulling a rope. There has been enough of this to 
bring reproach on academic discussion of affairs. By aca- 
XL [ 12 J 



OUR GOAL 

demic discussion of politics, for example, is meant theo- 
retical, impractical, doctrinaire. But there is an important 
and indispensable part for the man of talent and educa- 
tion to play. I do not say that his part is more essen- 
tial than that of the average working man, for all parts are 
necessary in the social organism. The eye cannot say to the 
hand, "I have no need of thee." But also the hand cannot 
say to the eye, "I have no need of thee." The state needs 
citizens of intellectual ability, of character, and of high standards, 
for leaders, rulers, and teachers, and has a right to look to the 
college for them. The college is an integral part of the system 
of education maintained by the state, and therefore the state 
has claims upon college-bred men. It is of little consequence 
whether colleges are established directly by the state or are 
privately endowed. In the latter case, the state grants im- 
munities and exemptions and refrains from maintaining col- 
leges and universities of its own. By cherishing higher educa- 
tional interests, the state signifies its need of cultivated men 
in the professions, in business, in legislation. By a process 
of selection, young men of promise and ambition continue 
their education for several years that they may render service 
of a higher order than manual labor — the service of leadership, 
which is as much needed as manual labor, without which 
manual labor is inefficient. That is to say, the state expends 
on a selected class a thorough training that they may be fitted 
for highest service to the state, whether they hold political 
office or not. And this class is the real aristocracy. 

We have outgrown the crude notion that democracy is 
equality and that it has no use for an aristocracy. Some belated 
doctrinaires are still proposing schemes for equalizing the con- 
dition of men, and so for equalizing men. But it is not the 
probler" of democracy to raise all men up nor to draw all men 
down to a common level. Its problem is to place its best men 
in its highest places, to put power in the hands of the wisest 
and most capable persons, to recognize superiority, always to 
put the right man in the right place. For the aristocracy of 
birth it has no great regard, although it does not forget that 
blood tells. For the vulgar aristocracy of wealth it has supreme 
XL [13] 



OUR GOAL 

contempt. To the accideW of rank and title it is indifferent. 
But it recognizes the aristocracy of merit, knowledge, character. 
Democracy would replace the aristocracy of birth by the aris- 
tocracy of worth; w^ould set aside the aristocracy that buys 
place with gold for that which earns place by capability and 
distinguished service. Democracy needs nothing so much as 
it needs such an aristocracy. Otherwise it is a mob, a crowd, 
a horde, a mass of unorganized and disorganized units. The 
very word "aristocracy" means the rule of the best, the best 
men in power. If the best men have guidance and control, 
progress is constantly made. If they are set aside in favor of 
the incompetent, there is confusion and every evil work. There 
are enough capable men in the United States to fill all positions 
of trust and honor, to be a political, economic, intellectual 
aristocracy. Put them in their rightful places, let the aristocracy 
of merit be enthroned as well as acknowledged, and there 
will be that government, that national welfare, that pros- 
perity which constitute social well-being and insure progress. 
So the state does not regard all citizens as equal and draw 
rulers and leaders by lot, but wants true, wise, able, educated 
men for guidance, organization, and service. Therefore in a 
democracy there must be higher education for the few who 
are fit by nature and may become fitter by training for leader- 
ship. Professor Paulsen, tracing the educational ideal of the 
future, says that "The society corresponding to that ideal 
would be that of an aristocracy of mind," and asks, "is this the 
type toward which we are leaning? Is the aristocracy of birth 
and wealth to be supplanted by the aristocracy of personal 
worth and merit?" "This," he says, "has been the philoso- 
pher's dream from the day of Plato's republic to the present 
hour. It is the tendency of nature. It would be the aris- 
tocracy of nature to have every individual stand independently 
upon his own personal merit, and not upon the achievements 
of his father, while the influence of heredity, in the sense of 
the transmission of personal characteristics, would not be 
diminished. This is the aristocracy to which historical de- 
velopment seems to point. Both church and state have 
made considerable advancement toward the realization of this 
XL [ 14 ] 



OUR GOAL 

ideal of a personal elite, by bestowing position and influence 
according to the degree of personal talent and efficiency with- 
out regard to birth and position." 

Education makes this ideal definite. The educated man 
is aware of the personal and social ideal of democracy, and can 
direct his energies intelligently toward its realization in the 
sphere of his own action. The movements of our time affect 
many who do not understand them. Not until changes have 
occurred do the uneducated discern them. Anybody can com- 
pare the close with the middle of the century and perceive 
advance in means of locomotion and communication — even 
in education, politics, and religion. Many who do not under- 
stand the significance of great movements are borne along by 
them to their own material, intellectual, and moral advantage. 
But educated men perceive tendencies in the making and 
foresee results not yet attained. To be sure, no one can read 
the future as one reads the past, for God's purposes in humanity 
are partly disclosed, partly concealed. Yet there is a direction 
of the path of progress out of the present into the future, a 
direction tolerably plain to one who knows the past and knows 
men. All liberal studies are for the one purpose of showing 
the ideal — the personal and social ideal — not only that it may 
be perceived but that there may be direction toward it in 
new and changing conditions. 



XL [15] 



I— THE OUTLOOK 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. LOW 

1. When and under what circumstances began the "era of 

revolution " which opened the way for the nineteenth 

century? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. xiii et seq. 

2. When and how did modern education begin? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 364. 

3. What were the great " transportation" triumphs of the past 

century in America? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 94; Vol, 
XVIII., p. 287. 

4. What triumphs equally great were elsewhere achieved? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., pp. 175 and 275. 

5. What started the vast emigration to Australia and to Africa? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 238; Vol. 
XVIII., p; 225. 

6. In what did the banking system of the United States 

originate? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 230. 

7. Whence sprang that of England? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 286. 

8. How were the markets of China opened to the world? And 

those of Japan? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 352; Vol. 
XVII., p. 265. 

9. What has been the course of democracy's struggle in 

England? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 311; Vol. XII., 
p. 200; Vol. XVI., pp. 175 and 252; Vol. 
XVII., p. 11. 

10. How has this struggle progressed throughout the world? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 281; Vol. 
XVII., p. XIV et seq. 



I 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE OUTLOOK," see as follows: 

See Lecture I 
Page. 

6. The great revolution in science and the earliest application 
of the new methods are described in History of Philoso- 
phy, by George Henry Lewes, or Great Events, Vol. 
XL, p. 116. 

6. The application of scientific methods to the problems of 

ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics is explained in The 
Dawn of Civilization, by G. C. C. Maspero, or Great 
Events, Vol. L, p. xxxviii et seq. 

7. The full story of the religious struggle against the accept- 

ance of the teachings of Copernicus is given in Great 
Astronomers, by Sir Robert Ball, or Great Events, Vol. 
IX., p. 285. 

11. The origin of the American banking system is detailed in 
History of the Bank of North America, by Alexander 
Hamilton, or Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 230. 

20. The history of the gradual extension of the franchise in 
England is narrated in The Constitutional History of 
England, by Sir Thomas May, or Great Events, Vol. 
XVI., p. 252. 

20. The tumult occasioned in Germany by the lack of suffrage 
and the repressive measures of the government is de- 
scribed in Prince Bismarck, by Charles Lowe, or Great 
j5wnte,Vol.XIX.,p. 104. 

23. Anarchism, its history, hopes, and aims, are explained in 
King Stork and King Log, by Sergius Stepniak, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 70. 

23. The hopes of the socialists, and also the growth of their 
party in politics, are explained in History of Socialism, 
by Thomas Kirkup, or Great Events, Vol. XVIII. , p. 141. 



U-THE DANGER 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 

1. When and where have the American farming classes proved 

their devotion to the country? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 1. 

2. Where have the laborers proved their value? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIIL, p. 12. 

3. When were the financial straits of the country and the 

distress of all classes most severe? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 230. 

4. What was the feeling of our Revolutionary leaders as to 

the equality of men? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. xxi. 

5. When were class distinctions most sharply emphasized here, 

and the classes politically opposed? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 143. 

6. What was the beginning of the Roman strife between 

Patricians and Plebeians? What was its outcome? 
See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 1. 

7. What led to the downfall of the Athenian Republic? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 48 

8. How was the First French Republic overthrown? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 339. 

9. What led to the downfall of the Second? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 230. 

10. What were the principles of Washington to which President 
Roosevelt refers? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 206. 



II 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE DANGER," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture II 

Page 

4. The dangers introduced into the Roman repubUc by 
class legislation are pointed out in the History of 
Rome, by Theodor Mommsen, or Great Events, 
Vol. II., p. 259. 

4. The failure of the French nation to maintain its 

liberty against the despotism of Napoleon is fully 
told in the Life of Napoleon, by William Hazlitt, 
or Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 76. 

5. For details of the way in which the "government of 

a mob" brought modern France into desolation 
consult Contemporary France, by Gabriel Hanotaux, 
or Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 351. 

5, The intrigues aroused by class government in ancient 
Greece are depicted in many of Plutarch's Lives, 
or in Great Events, Vol. II., p. 12. 

5. The utter corruption of the so-called republics in 

mediceval Italy is revealed in the works of Machia- 
velli, or Great Events, Vol. VIIL, p. 360. 

6. The internal strife of the Flemish cities and their 

consequent downfall are portrayed in H. Denicke's 
work, Von der deutschen Hansa, or Great Events, 
Vol. VI., p. 214. 

10. President Lincoln's purposes and hopes in the Civil 
War are fully explained in his own works, or see 
Great Events, Vol. XVIIL, p. 70. 

10. The sore struggles of soul which beset General Grant 
are revealed in his Memoirs, or see Great Events, 
Vol. XVIIL, p. 153. 



Ill -THE BELIEFS 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OP COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY SIR OLIVER LODGE 

1. How did religion and science harmonize in earliest history? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxv et seq. 

2. What was their feeling toward each other just before the 

advent of Christianity? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xiv et seq. 

3. In mediaeval days what attitude did religious leaders 

assume toward doubters? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 340; Vol. VI., 
p. 173; Vol. VII... p. 229. 

4. What was the reason for this attitude? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 301. 

5. What was the " Reformation," and what its causes? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. xiii et seq. 

6. What attitude toward science did the Church adopt after 

this period? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 27. 

7. For what reasons? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 184 et seq. 

8. What was the attitude of science toward the Church at 

this time? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, pp. 184 and 116 et seq. 

9. When did scientific philosophy rise to open and equal 

antagonism against Christianity? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. xvi et seq. 

10. What disastrous consequences followed? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 144. 



Ill 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE BELIEFS," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture III 
Page 

2. For a historical account of the Bible, and especially 

its translation into English, see How We Got Our 
Bible, by J. P. Smyth, or Great Events, Vol, VII., 
p. 227. 

3. The chief struggles of the mediaeval church to buttress 

its faith against doubters are narrated in the Close 
of the Middle Ages, by Richard Lodge, or Great 
Events, Vol. VII., p. 284. 

4. For the sad story of the Crucifixion read Archdeacon 

Farrar's Life of Christ, or Great Events, Vol. III., 
p. 23. 

4. The turn which the preachings of St. Paul gave to 

the Christian faith are suggested in the Origin of 
Christianity, by I. M. Wise, or Great Events, Vol. III., 
p. 69. 

5. The tragic story of the opposition of the Church to 

scientific progress is detailed in our author's own 
volume, Pioneers of Science, or see Great Events, 
Vol. XL, p. 14. 

12. As to Plato's dreams and plans for posterity consult 
his own works, or Great Events, Vol. II., p. 87. 

18. The aid which Herodotus has offered to Egyptologists 

is emphasized in M. Maspero's work, The Dawn of 
Civilization, or see Great Events, Vol. I., p. 1. 

19. For the marvels narrated by Herodotus, one must 

read his History, or Great Events, Vol. I., p. 354. 



IV-THE SUCCESSES 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT ELIOT 

1. What chief contributions to modern civilization were made 

by the ancient races? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. xi et seq. 

2. How far had civilization progressed when the colonization 

of America began? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. xiii. 

3. In what country at that time was man's progress most 

advanced, and why? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 

4. What gave special impetus to progress among the American 

Colonies? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, pp. 93 and 153. 

5. Since, as President Eliot points out, the ordinary causes 

of war have been inoperative in America since 1759, 
from what have our wars originated? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 241; Vol. XIX., 
p. 235. 

6. How did the United States first formally attempt to sub- 

stitute arbitration for war? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 367. 

7. How and where was religious toleration first established 

in America? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 303. 

8. What had been Europe's attitude upon this matter? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. xiii et seq. 

9. What was the attitude of Europe in the nineteenth century 

toward democracy and "manhood" suffrage? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. xiii et seq. 

10. What were America's earliest contributions to the practical 
inventions of the world? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 130; Vol. XIV., 
p. 211. 



IV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE SUCCESSES/' see as follows: 

See 

Lecture IV 

Page 

2. The struggle of the Dutch for freedom is described in 
the celebrated work of Schiller, The Revolt of the 
Netherlands, or Great Events, Vol. X., p. 81 

2, The teaching of Europe by France in the eighteenth 
century is pointed out in G. W. Kitchin's History 
of France, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 144. 

2. For the two mighty upheavals of German sentiment 

consult History of Germany, bv W. Menzel, or Great 
Events, Vol. XV., p. 281, and Vol. XVII., p. 152. 

3. The circumstances and value of the Geneva Arbitra- 

tion are described by Theodore D. Woolsey, in a 
special monograph. See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., 
p. 367. 

4. The bitterness of the strife between England and 

France in America is depicted in W. H. Withrow's 
History of Canada, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., 
p. 181. 

5. The naval events of the War of 1812 are given by 

Theodore Roosevelt in his Naval War of 1812; the 
land strife, from contemporary partisan standpoints, 
in the histories of Agnes Machar and David Ramsay, 
or see Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 241 and p. 268. 

6. The Monroe Doctrine is fully explained in a mono- 

graph by Captain A. T. Mahan. See Great Events, 
Vol. XVI., p. 80. 

13. The tremendous influence of the Crusades is dis- 
cussed by G. W. Cox in The Crusades, or in Great 
Events, Vol. V., p. 276. 



V— THE. BEGINNINGS 



QUESTIONS 

f 

LEADING TO A COUESE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. ROBINSON 

1. What were the views of the ancient Egyptians as to the 

origin of man? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 4 et seq. 

2. What in Babylonic chronicles were the relations of gods 

and men? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 15. 

3. Had the ancient Asiatics any scientific conception of the 

problems involved in man's creation? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 42 et seq. 

4. What was the attitude of Greek philosophy upon man's 

origin? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 88 et seq. 

5. How did the Roman world regard the problem? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xv. 

6. When and in what region did man make his first great step 

away from the "developed bmte"? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxv. 

7. What was the first important step in man's recognition 

of his true relation to the rest of creation? 
See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 245. 

8. When and how 'did the Biblical narrative come to be 

accepted in an overliteral sense? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 87. 

9. When did modern science first begin to realize the error 

of the religious historians? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 113 et seq. 

10. What has so far been the culmination of this movement? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 282. 



V 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE BEGINNINGS," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture V 
Page 

2. Darwin's own feeling as to the consequences of his 
doctrines is expressed in Life and Letters of Charles 
Darvnn, by his son, or Great Events, Vol. XVII., 
p. 326. 

4. The methods of Newton's analysis and approach to 
his great discovery are explained in Life of Sir 
Isaac Neiuton, by Sir D. Brewster, or Great Events, 
Vol. XII., p. 51. 

11. The strife of Northern Europe against the South is 
best portrayed in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire. See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 1. 

18. The struggles and sufferings attendant on dawning 

civilization in the regions of northern cold are sug- 
gested by Tacitus in his Annals, or Great Events, 
Vol. III., p. 1. 

19. For the birth of language consult also Great Events, 

Vol. I., p. xxietseq. 

20. The earliest historic form of Aryan civilization is 

described by Sir William Hunter in his Brief History 
of the Indian People, or in Great Events, Vol. I., p. 57. 



VI -THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. BURKE 

1. What belief as to the origin of life existed in ancient Greece? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 105. 

2. What ideas are suggested in the Roman tales of Livy? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 132 et seq. 

3. What are the legends of Japan as to the vital source? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 140. 

4. What were the myths of India? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 62. 

5. Did mediaeval science make any advance upon these views? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 130. 

6. What terrible disasters opened the way to the recognition 

of the existence of bacteria? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 29. 

7. What was the earliest scientific study made of them? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 366. 

8. What practical results were obtained from this? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 372. 

9. What practical knowledge of crystallography has been 

acquired from African mining? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 225. 

10. How have vigorous changes of scientific thought been 

previously received? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 338; Vol. XVII., 
p. 1. 



VI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE ORIGIN OF LIFE," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture VI 

Page 

2. The scientific attempts of Harvey to trace the con- 
nection between life and the flow of blood are 
described by Thomas Huxley in a monograph on 
Harvey. See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 50. 

2. The beginnings of modern scientific experimentation 

are told bj^ George Henry Lewes in his History of 
Philosophy, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 116. 

3. The antagonism and disputes into which scientists 

have sometimes been drawn are suggested in Sir 
Oliver Lodge's Pioneers of Science, or Great Events, 
Vol. XL, p. 14. 

5. The character and peculiarities of African diamonds 

are explained by G. F. Williams in his work, The 
Diamond Mines of South Africa, or Great Events, 
Vol. XVIIL, p. 225. 

6. The first practical result of research into the world of 

microscopic life is described by Sir Thomas Petti- 
grew, in his Medical Portrait Gallery, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIV., p. 363. 

8. For the earliest practical study of electricity see John 
Bigelow's Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, 
or Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 130. 



VII— THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRINCE KROPOTKIN 

1. What was the nature of the revolution caused by Darwin? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. xxii. 

2. What was the nature of that earUer thought revolution 

with which Prince Kropotkin compares the epoch of 
Darwin ? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 116. 

3. On what famous "first conclusion" is modern philosophy 

founded? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. xvi. 

4. What is Darwinism itself as contrasted with evolution, 

with the origin of species, and other allied questions? 
See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 326 et seq. 

5. Do present-day scientists accept the Darwinism of 1859? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 326. 

6. Have the Japanese the same view as we concerning animals 

and their relation to man? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 156. 

7. Have the Chinese? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., pp. 291 and 296. 

8. What have been the chief broad social movements of 

humanity? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. xiii; Vol. VII., 
p. XIII et seq. 

9. In what ages has this social "instinct" seemed feeblest? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. xii. 

10. At what period did the feeling of political union begin to 
supersede that of religious union among European races? 
See Great Events, Vol. XL, pp. xiii-xv. 



^11 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE BIRTH OF CONSCIENCE," see 

AS follows: 

See 

Lecture VII 
Page 

2. The conditions in Russia which led to the exile of 
Prince Kropotkin are described in Wilhelm Mueller's 
Political History of Recent Times, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIX., p. 1. 

2. For the character and influence of the work of Darwin 
consult the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, by 
his son, or Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 326. 

6. The story of Bodisatta, or Buddha, is narrated in 
Buddhism, by J. W. Rhys-Davids, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 160. 

6. The gradual Development of Christian Doctrine is 
pointed out by Cardinal Newman in his work of 
that name. See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 88. 

11. For the period of government by logic, and "benevo- 
lent despotism," see Great Events, Vol. XIII., Out- 
line Narrative. 

11. The spirit which underlay the foundation of religious 
schools in the Middle Ages is analyzed by J. A. 
Symonds in The Renaissance in Italy, or Great 
Events, Vol. VII., p. 110. 

18. The many beast legends of the mythologies of the 

East are discussed by W. W. Hunter in his Brief 
History of the Indian People, or Great Events, Vol. I., 
p. 57. 

19. For the sacred respect shown the crocodile in Egy])t 

see G. C. C. Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, or Great 
Events, Vol. I., p. 1. 



VIII-THE SOUL IN BEASTS 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY COUNTESS CESARESCO 

1. What idea of animals was held in ancient Babylonia? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 37 et seq. 

2. What was their place in the religious faith of Egypt? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 6 et seq. 

3. What attitude toward animals was held by the people 

of India? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 60. 

4. What importance is given beasts in Japanese legend? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 149. 

5. What importance is given them in the Buddhist faith? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 165 et seq. 

6. How did the early Christian Church regard those who dis- 

puted its doctrines? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 299. 

7. At the time of "beast trials" in the courts of Europe, 

what sort of justice was meted out to men? 
See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 51. 

8. Did sense or superstition guide the courts? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 356. 

9. How did the Eastern fairy-tales of beasts become spread 

through Europe? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 270. 

10. When did science begin to make valuable use of vivisection? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 52. 



VIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE SOUL IN BEASTS," see as 

FOLLOWS : 

See 
Lecture VIII 
Page 

1. The attitude of both repubhcan and imperial Rome 

on reUgious questions is summed up in Niebuhr's 
Lectures on the History of Rome, or Great Events, 
Vol. IL, pp. 313 and 333. 

2. The religious influence of Egypt on the western world 

is discussed by J. P. Mahaffy in his Empire of the 
Ptolemies. See Great Events, Vol. II. , p. 295. 

3. The growth of early Christian dogma is described by 

A. P. Stanley in his History of the Eastern Church. 
See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 299. 

4. The attitude of the Inquisition toward the fantasies 

of its day is explained in W. H. Rule's History of 
the Inquisition, or Great Events, Vol. VIII. , p. 166. 

8. The persecution of the Albigenses is described by 
T. F. Tout in The Empire and the Papacy, or Great 
Events, Vol. VI., p. 156. 

12. For the aesthetic enjoyment of animals and their 
beauty, which came with the Renaissance, consult 
Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance 
in Italy, or Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 93. 

15. The difficulties with the Church in which Descartes 
became involved are detailed in G. H. Lewes's His- 
tory of Philosophy, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 116. 



IX-THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. WALLACE 

1. What evidence does human history give us as to possibili- 

ties of modification through environment? 

See Great Events, VoL I., pp. xxiv et seq. and 66. 

2. Did the laws established by man in Greece tend to modify 

or emphasize the survival of the fittest? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxxiii. 

3. Did the "fittest" survive under the domination of Babylon 

and Assyria? 

See Great Events, VoL I., p. iii et seq. 

4. To what extent were the matrimonial customs of the time 

possibly responsible for this? 

See Great Events, VoL I., p. 25 et seq. 

5. Where has this natural law of selection shown marked evi- 

dence of failure in its application to mankind? 

See Great Events, VoL XI., p. xviii; VoL XIIL, 

p. XIV. 

6. Has civilized man ever really succeeded in acquiring the 

supposedly hereditary characteristics and abilities of 

the savage? 

See Great Events, VoL XIL, pp. 108 et seq. and 
297. 

7. Has recent history offered any marked justification for Mr. 

Darwin's despondent view of man's future? 
See Great Events, VoL XIX., p. 70. 

8. What justification does it offer for Mr. Wallace's optimism? 

See Great Events, VoL XIX., p. 282. 

9. To what extent have Mr. Wallace's natural checks on popu- 

lation actually operated in past ages? 

See Great Events, VoL IV., p. xiv; VoL V., pp. 
22 and 130. 

10. Is war likely to be less destructive of life in the future? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. ,381. 



IX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE FAILURE OF EVOLUTION," 
SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture IX 

Page 

6. The feebleness of the Romans as compared with the 
barbaric invaders is shown in the Roman History of 
Ammianus MarcelUnus, or in Great Events, Vol. III., 
p. 352. 

6. The degeneration of the Roman race under the Em- 
perors is graphically portrayed in Gibbon's Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire, or see Great Events, 
Vol. III., p. 263. 

10. For the ancient laws upon the indissolubility of mar- 
riage consult the Code of Laws of Justinian. See 
Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 138. 

10. The gradual advance of monogamy in the course of 
civilization is pointed out in Great Events, Vol. IV., 
Introduction. 

12. The checks upon population caused by war may be 
vividly realized from Dr. Gardiner's work on The 
Thirty Years' War. See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 50. 

12. The effects of pestilence in checking population are 
summarized in The Black Death, by J. F. Hecker, or 
Great Events, Vol. VIL, p. 130. 

14. The limitations placed upon population by the neces- 
sities of savage life are shown in Great Events, Vol. 
IV., p. XII et seq. 



X-THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY IRA REMSEN 

1. What ancient races were foremost in the early development 

of science? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxvi. 

2. Did mediaeval science exert any genuine control over 

disease? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., pp. 130 and 187. 

3. What were the first important steps in modern scientific 

advance? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 285. 

4. What was the last great horror in which man's ancient 

helplessness before disease was manifested? 
See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 29. 

o. How has science revolutionized the theories of medical 

practice? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 36.3. 

6. How has science revolutionized traffic? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 1,59; Vol. XVI.. 
p. 157. 

7. How has it altered art? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 338. 

5. What has been the greatest triumph of mathematical 

science? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 25. 

9. How has science revolutionized war? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 38. 

10. What have been its chief triumphs in electricity? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 1; Vol. XVIII., 
p. 175. 



X 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE LATEST KNOWLEDGE," see 

AS follows: 

See 

Lecture X 
Page 

3. The state of science in the earliest historical times is 
shown in The Dawn of Civilization, by Ci. C. C. Mas- 
pero. See Great Events, Vol. L, p. L 

3. The efforts of medical science to alleviate the suffer- 
ings of our race are illustrated in J. C. Hecker's 
Epidemics of the Middle Ages, or in Great Events, 
Vol. VIL, p. 187. 

6. The commercial condition of Chili and the value of its 
mines are pointed out in Sir Clements Markham's 
work, The War between Chili and Peru, or in Great 
Events, Vol. XIX., p. 50. 

9. The enormous wealth of India is shown in Ledger and 
Sword, by H. B. Willson, or in Great Events, Vol. XL, 
p. 30. 

10. For the early struggles of medical men to introduce 
inoculation against disease consult Sir Thomas 
Pettigrew's Medical Portrait Gallery, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIV., p. 363. 

13. The industrial advance of Germany is described by 
Emil Reich in his Foundations of Modern Europe, 
or in Great Events, Vol. XVIII. , p. 340. 

13. The attitude of the generation of men first called on to 
discard the idea that the earth was flat is depicted 
in Pioneers of Science, by Sir Oliver Lodge, or Great 
Events, Vol. XL, p. 14. 



XI -OUR COUNTRY 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT WILSON 

1 . Where do we find the beginnings of constitutional govern- 

ment in America? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 76. 

2. By what steps did it develop previous to the Revolution? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., pp. 153 and 205; 
Vol. XII., p. 241; Vol. XIII., p. 289. 

3. How was the United States Constitution finally established? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 173. 

4. Where did English constitutional government begin? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., pp. 75 and 246. 

5. In what sense has the war of 1812 been specially regarded 

as "making the nation"? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 241. 

6. What events opened the way for the westward progress of 

our nation? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., pp. 39 and 284. 

7. What was the first great effort of Eastern capital to facili- 

tate communication with the West? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 94. 

8. Under what stimulus did settlers first cross the great plains 

of the Central West? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 94. 

9. What led them to the Pacific coast? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., pp. 34 and 188. 

10. What sentiment of disunion found^expression in the " Hart- 
ford Convention " ? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 326. 



XI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "OUR COUNTRY," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XI 

Page 

2. The views of early American statesman as to the 
strength and permanence of the union of the States 
are given by Andrew Young in The American States- 
man, or Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 173. 

2. For the spirit of the American nation in 1812 consult 
President Roosevelt's Naval War of 1812. See Great 
Events, Vol. XV., p. 268. 

4. The early and increasing dissatisfaction felt by the 
Southern States at the high tariff laws is explained 
in the speeches of Senator Calhoun. See Great Events, 
Vol. XVI., p. 217. 

6. The truly national desire for union which persisted in 
the South in 1860 is shown in Jefferson Davis' Rise 
and Fall of the Confederate Government, or Great 
Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 1. 

9. The way in which the American colonies were forced 
into united action by England is perhaps best illus- 
trated in Bancroft's History of the United States. See 
Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 289. 

12. Washington has himself told us the story of his con- 
nection with the French and Indian war. See his 
Works, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 163. 

14. For the views of Jefferson on the Louisiana Purchase 
and the difficulties he encountered consult the Life 
of Thomas Jefferson, by H. S. Randall, or Great 
Events, Vol. XV., p. 39. 

16. The Missouri Compromise has been fully discussed in 
a recent monograph by James A. Woodburn. See 
Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 14. 



XII -PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS 



(QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY CARDINAL GIBBONS 

1. How was "party spirit" roused among the politicians of 

Athens, and to what length did it go? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 329; Vol. II., pp. 15, 
28. 32, 45, and 87. 

2. What extremes of political corruption do we find revealed 

in Greek history? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 350; Vol. II., p. 25. 

3. How did the enemies of Greece take advantage of this 

corruption? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., pp. 68 and 166. 

4. What w^ere the early political parties in Rome, and in what 

disasters did their strife involve the city? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 313; Vol. II., p. 1. 

5. What gross abuses did the increasing wealth of Rome bring 

into its politics? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 259. 

6. To what heights of patriotism were the Athenians roused 

by Pericles? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 42 et seq. 

7. What did the Romans endure for the love of country in the 

war with Carthage? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 179. 

8. What sacrifices to patriotism were made by the ancient 

Jews? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., pp. 150 and 222. 

9. How did the founders of the American Republic show their 

confidence in the patriotism of succeeding generations? 
See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 173. 

10. What opposing problems of patriotism arose in the Ameri- 
can Revolution? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 30. 



XII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "PATRIOTISM AND POLITICS," see 

AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XII 

Page 

2. The Elizabethan methods of dramatic presentation as 

compared with the modern stage are shown in Halli- 
well-PhilUpps' Memoranda on Hamlet, or Great 
Events, Vol. X., p. 287. 

3. The story of Brazil and the flight of its Emperor are 

told in Sketches in Brazil, by D. P. Kidder, or Great 
Events, Vol. XV., p. 18L 

3. The development of American patriotism is well [illus- 
trated in the literary Works of Lincoln, or in Great 
Events, Vol. XVIII. , p. 70. 

5. The tale of Leonidas and his Spartans is told by Herod- 
otus in his History. See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 354. 

5. The story of Marathon and the probable effect the 

victory of Xerxes would have had upon civilization 
are discussed in Sir Edward Creasy's Fifteen Decisive 
Battles, or Great Events, Vol. I., p. 322. 

6. The deeds of Horatius and the other early Romans are 

narrated in Liddell's History of Rome, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 300. 

7. The submission to civil government shown by the 

early Christians is described by Archdeacon Farrar 
in his Early Days of Christianity, or in Great Events, 
Vol. III., p. 134. 

8. For the American notion of a State see the Declaration 

of l7idependence, and Works of Thomas Jefferson. 
See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 39. 

10. The debauchery of the electorate, by which Caesar won 
election to office, is shown in Mommsen's History of 
Rome, or Great Events, Vol. II., p. 259. 



XIII -AMBITION 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY DR. NORDAU 

1 . What are the changes in the constitution of society which 

have given impetus to ambition? 

See Great Events, vol. V., p. 1 et seq. 

2. What was the first of the written free constitutions which 

stand as the basis of modern Ufe? What were its 

provisions? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 205 et seq. 

3. What is it that has mainly stimulated what Nordau calls 

" the democratic transformation of the peoples "? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., pp. xiii, xiv, and 

XVIII. 

4. In what period did the " human spirit " first attain to self- 

conscious freedom? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 112. 

5. What were the " conditions of success " at the time of the 

early Renaissance? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 136 et seq. 

6. Of the later Renaissance? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 360 et seq. 

7. What were the "conditions of success" in the ages of 

chivalry? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 109. 

8. What were the ambitions of a still earlier age? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 117 et seq. 

9. When did literary success first become the most powerful 

means of influencing the world? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., pp. xiii and xv et 
seq. 

10. What was then the general character of that influence? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 144. 



XIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "AMBITION," SEE AS FOLLOWS: 

See 

Lecture XIII 

Page 

2. Feudalism, its value and also its destructive influenct 
through all Europe, are fully discussed in The Con- 
stitutional History of England, by William Stubbs 
or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 1. 

5. For Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and the whole awaken- 

ing joy of their era, consult J. A. Symonds' The 
Renaissance in Italy, or Qreat Events, Vol. VIL, 
p. 110; Vol. VIIL, p. 134. 

6. The history and also an appreciative criticism of 

Dante's poems are given by R. W. Church in his 
Dante. See Great Events, Vol. VIL, p. 1. 

13. The story of Newton's advance toward the great dis- 
covery of gravitation is more fully told in the Life 
of Newton, by Sir David Brewster. See Great Events, 
Vol. XII., p. 1. 

16. The literary struggles of Bunyan and the other writers 
of his time are fully described in History of English 
Literature of the Eighteenth Century, by Edmund 
Gosse, or see Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 100. 

16. For Schiller's thought and work consult German 
Thought, bv Karl Hillebrand, or Great Events, Vol. 
XIIL, p. 347. 

16. The tragedy of Byron's life is narrated in John Nicol's 
Byron. See Great Events, Vol. XVL, p. 65. 



XIV- OUR PAST 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY M. MAETERLINCK 

1. In the early, ages, what great men recognized for thenj- 

selves the superior importance of mental experiences over 
outside life? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., pp. 94 and 270; Vol. 
II., p. 147. 

2. When did philosophy first teach the dominance of the 

subjective? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 160. 

3. What are the Hindu doctrines as to this? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 161 et seq. 

4. Have these ideas had any marked influence upon the Hindu 

race? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 57. 

5. How did the Greeks estimate the dominance of the past? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 87. 

6. What were the views of Socrates upon this? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 99 et seq. 

7. When did the civilization of Rome become unprogressive, 

weighed down by pride in its past? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 133. 

8. How did this weight palsy the efforts of even the noblest of 

her Emperors? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 263. 

9. When has the history of Europe seemed to grow stagnant 

behind similar barriers? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 1, 

10. How did this blight come to fall with deadly effect upon the 

land of Spain? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 251. 



XIV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "OUR PAST/' SEE AS follows: 



See 

Lecture XIV 

Page 



4. A remarkable progressive development in character 

under this influence of the past may be studied 
in the Life of Luther, by Julius Koestlin. See Great 
Events, Vol. IX., p. 1. 

5. This stagnation in a nation whose moral growth has 

ceased is grimly illustrated in The Civilizations of 
India, by Gustave Le Bon, or Great Events, Vol. I., 
p. 52. 

8. The spirit by which the Romans con(iuered the world 
is shown in Niebuhr's Lectures on the History of Rome, 
or Great Events, Vol. II,, p. 313. 

8. The power and rectitude of vision which enabled Napo- 
leon to triumph are shown in Sir Walter Scott's 
Life of Napoleon, or Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 339. 

8. The early sense of the power and influence of the dead 

is revealed in all savage races, as in the introduction 
to the Law Code of Hammurabi of Babylon. See 
Great Events, Vol. I., p. 14. 

9. The contrast between a fading past and a vigorous 

present are illustrated in the lesson Tacitus tries to 
draw for Rome from the German tribes. See Annals 
of Tacitus, or Great Events, Vol. III., p. 1, 



XV-ART 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OP COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. HOWELLS 

1 . What views were held by the earliest nations as to the value 

of art in life? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxv. 

2. What progress had they made in the development of art? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 1. 

3. What place did art hold in the Grecian world? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 181. 

4. How did the power of Grecian art finally prove more en- 

durant than that of Roman military genius? 
See Great Events, Vol. II., p. xix. 

5. When did the power and value of art begin to reassert 

themselves after the Dark Ages? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 1. 

6. What caused the remarkable awakening known as the 

Renaissance? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 110. 

7. At what period did architecture hold the highest place 

among the arts? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 46. 

8. When was poetry crowned with this distinction, and what 

was predicted as to its future? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 93. 

9. When did music hold a similar pre-eminence? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 33. 

10. What faith did music lovers then hold as to its future? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 42. 



XV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OP SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "ART," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XV 

Pace 

2. The lack of artistic interest or knowledge in patrons 

of art is illustrated in Margaret Oliphant's Makers 
of Rome, or Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 46. 

3. The attitude of the modern public toward artistic work 

found its first expression and example in their treat- 
ment of Dante. See Dante, by R. W. Church, or 
Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 1. 

5. The combined subtlety and simplicity of Shakespeare 
are displayed by Halliwell-Phillipps ^in his Memo- 
randa of Hamlet, or Great Events, Vol. X., ]). 287. 

7. The abdication of Charles V.,with its causes and con- 
sequences, is fully described in Robertson's History 
of the Reign of Charles V., or Great Events, Vol. IX., 
p. 348. 

9. The modern change of attitude toward work and work- 
ers is revealed in William Stubbs' Constitutional 
History of England, or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 1. 

9. For a modern example of work by those who need not 
work consult Charles Lowe's Prince Bismarck, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 104. 

2L The delight of mediaeval and renaissance artists in 
painting the Madonna is explained by Charles Clem- 
ent in his Michael Angelo, or Great Events, Vol. 
VIII., p. 369. 



XVl-ART AND MORALITY 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY M. BRUNETIERE 

1 . What was the origin of the French Academy? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 347. 

2. What was the general moral tone of the French drama of 

the seventeenth century? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 347 et seq. 

3. What work is generally accepted as the culmination of 

dramatic literature, and why? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 287. 

4. Who were the iconoclasts and what their attitude toward 

art? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 191. 

5. What attitude did early Christianity assume toward art? 

See Great Events, Vol. IIL, p. 247. 

6. When did art dominate morality in Italian life? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIL, p. 121. 

7. In the Italian Church? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 2. 

8. What union was established between art and religion? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII. , p. 369. 

9. When did art first recognize the beauty of nature? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIL, p. 93. 

10. When did nature and emotion dominate art? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII. , p. 40. 



^ 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "ART AND MORALITY," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XVI 

Page 

4. The really pagan nature of the Greek and Roman 
gods is shown in Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii. 
See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 207. 

9. The environment of French life in the eighteenth cen- 
tury is described in the History of France, by G. W. 
Kitchin, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 160. 

IL The conditions of Italian life in the fifteenth centur}' 
are described in the History of the Italian Republics, 
by Sismondi, or Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 265. 

11. The criticism quoted is from J. A. Symonds' Renais- 
sance; see also Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 110. 

15. For the lives of Moliere and Racine consult the His- 
tory of French Literature, bv H. Van Laun, or Great 
Events, Vol. XL, p. 347. 

19. For Samuel Richardson consult the History of English 
Literature in the Eighteenth Century, by Edmund 
Gosse, or Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 101. 

23. The influence of the Papac}^ on Rome is delineated by 
Gregorovius in his History of the City of Rome. See 
Great Events, Vol. VI., p. 378. 

23. France, under the regime of the seventeenth century, 
has been depicted in a monograph, Louis XIV., by 
J. C, Morison, or Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 1. 



XVU -WOMAN 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON 

THE THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY ELIZABETH S. DIACK 

AND WILLIAM LILLY 

1. Was Cleopatra an exception to the condition of women in 

Egypt? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 295. 

2. What was the general condition of Grecian morality in the 

time of Aspasia? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 12. 

3. Was the "mother of the Gracchi" the typical Roman 

woman, or exceptional? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 259. 

4. What position did woman hold amid the orgies of Nero? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 139. 

5. How was she regarded among the primitive Christians? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 254. 

6. Whence arose the mediaeval glorification of woman? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 109. 

7. To what extent did it influence her practical condition? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 125. 

8. What great divorce case aroused strife between the Papacy 

and France, and how was it settled? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. 156. 

9. What were the circumstances of the still more serious di- 

vorce question between the Papacy and Henry VIII. 

of England? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 137. 

10. How did the German Empire and the Papacy become em- 
broiled over this same dispute, and -mth what disastrous 

results? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 124. 



XVII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "WOMAN," SEE AS follows: 

Lecture XVII 
Page 

2. The peculiar marriage customs of ancient Egypt are 
described in The Empire of the Ptolemies, by J. P. 
Mahaffy, or Great Events, Vol. II., p. 295. 

2. The sufferings of women under the later Egyptian 

tyranny are set forth in The Mameluke or Slave 
Dynasty in Egypt, by Sir W. Muir. See Great 
Events, Vol. VI., p. 240. 

3. For the position of woman among the Babylonians see 

the Law Code of Hammurabi, in Great Events, Vol. 
I., p. 28. 

7. The condition of women in early Rome is described by 
H. G. Liddell in his History of Rome, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 300. 

7. The Roman women of Nero's day are well depicted by 
Sienkiewicz in Quo Vadis, or Great Events, Vol. III., 
p. 108. 

10. The position of the aboriginal women in Britain is de- 
scribed in Goldsmith's History of England, or Great 
Events, Vol II., p. 285. 

16. The broad question of the assertion of supremacy by 
the Roman pontiffs is historically discussed by T. F. 
Tout in The Empire and the Papacy, or Great Events, 
Vol. VI., p. 156. 

18. The general Catholic estimate of the Reformation may 
be gathered from Audin's Life of Luther, or Great 
Events, Vol. IX., p. 26. 



XVIII -UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 

THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY FRANCES POWER COBBE 

AND WILLIAM K. HILL 

1. What share had women in the government of any of the 

early nations? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., pp. 9, 73, and 120. 

2. What was their legal status in Greece? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 236. 

3. In Rome? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 151 et seq. 

4. What was woman's status in mediaeval law? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 1 17 et seq, 

5. Is Mr. Hill justified in his estimate of the narrowness of 

Queen Elizabeth's statesmanship? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 

6. How much power did Isabella of Spain really exercise upon 

her contemporaries? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 202. 

7. To what extent was she swayed by others? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 166. 

8. What were the real aims and successes of Margaret of 

Denmark? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 243. 

9. Were the triumphs of Joan of Arc intellectual or spiritual? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 233. 

10. In which light were they regarded by her contemporaries? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 350. 



XVIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XVIIl 

Page 

2. The purely personal government of ancient Greece is 
shown in Grote's History of Greece, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 203. 

2. The autocratic power of Louis XIV. is described by 

J. C. Morison in his Louis XIV., or Great Events, 
Vol. XII., p. 1. 

3. The character of the Rig Veda is described, with 

extracts, in W. W. Hunter's Brief History of the 
Indian People, or Great Events, Vol. I., p. 57. 

6. The full story of the struggles and triumphs of Maria 
Theresa is given by W. Smyth in his Lectures on 
Modern History, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 108. 

6. An excellent account of Russia under the rule of 
Catharine is given by W. K. Johnson in his Catha- 
rine II., or Great Events, Vol. XIII. , p. 250. 

12. The influence of St. Paul in changing the practical 
application of Christianity is pointed out in the 
Origin of Christianity, by I. M. Wise, or Great Events, 
Vol. III., p. 69. 

14. For the sources of Joan of Arc's success consult 
Michelet's History of France, or Great Events, Vol. 
VII., p. 350. 

14. A careful analysis of the causes of Queen Elizabeth's 
greatness is made by H. R. Cleveland in his Queen 
Elizabeth or Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 



XIX SOCIETY 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY LADY PONSONBY 

1. What was the origin of the modern aristocratic system in 

Europe? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 1. 

2. From whom are the aristocracy of France and Germany 

descended? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 22. 

3. From what race sprang the upper classes in England? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 204. 

4. How did the French nobility become changed fl'om feudal 

barons to courtiers? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 129. 

5. How did Voltaire regard the " society " of his day? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 144. 

6. How did the " society " regard Voltaire? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xv. 

7. To what extent was the French Revolution caused by the 

upper classes? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 212. 

8. Did they meet it in a way to justify their repute? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 295. 

9. Was the English Revolution of 1688 caused by the lower 

classes or the aristocracy? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 200. 

10. What great events mainly fastened the rule of an aristoc- 
racy upon England? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. xviii. 



XIX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "SOCIETY," SEE AS FOLLOWS: 

See 

Lecture XIX 

Page 

3. The vast influence of Moliere's Les PrScieuses Ridicules 
is described by H. Van Laun in his History of French 
Literature, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 347. 

3. The career of Mazarin in France, and his influence on 
society, are cUscussed by Arthur Hassall in his 
Mazarin, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 285. 

7. The pose of "honor" set up by Francis I., and its 
downfall, are detailed by Robertson in his History 
of the Reign of Charles V ., or Great Events, Vol. IX., 

p. in. 

14. The trials of the French noblewomen in the Reign of 
Terror are depicted by Guizot in his History of 
France, or Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 311. 

14. The conditions of life in England in the eighteenth 

century may best be gathered from W. Lecky's 
History of England in the Eighteenth Century, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIII. , p. 57.. 

15. English society of the early nineteenth century is por- 

trayed in Justin McCarthy's Epoch of Reform. See 
Great Events, Vol. XVIL, p. 11. 

20. The contrasting natures of mediaeval and modern 
society are illustrated in Gibbon's Decline and Fall 
of the Roman Empire. See Great Events, Vol. IV., 
p. 138. 

22. Swinburne's celebrated account of the Scottish Queen 
is given in a monograph, Mary Stuart, or see Great 
Events, Vol. XL, p. 51. 



XX-THE CHILD 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. WELLS 

1. How was the infant received and how were its needs recog- 

nized in ancient Babylon? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 30 et seq. 

2. What training was given it among the East Asiatic people? 

See Great Events, Vol. T., p. 273. 

3. What under the Buddhist system? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 55. 

4. Why did the early Aryan races specially value children? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 161. 

5. How were children welcomed in early Roman days? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 151. 

6. When did present-day ideas of early training first take root? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 194. 

7. To whom had the training of children been successfully 

intmsted before? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 192. 

8. What were the principles announced by Ccmenius, the 

founder of modern education? 

See Great Events, Vol XL, p. 200. 

9. What was the origin of the kindergarten system? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 364. 

10. What were the chief precepts of Pestalozzi? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIIL, p. 368. 



XX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE CHILD," SEE as follows: 

See 

Lecture XX 

Page 

8. The earliest effort at teaching very little children 
according to modern ideas is described in Pesta- 
lozzi's Method of Education, by G. Ripley, or Great 
Events, Vol. XIII., p. 364. 

12. For the causes and the probability of the loss of early 
languages see Introduction to Great Events, Vol. 

I., p. XXI. 

12. The destruction of the old Sanskrit as a literary 
language was completed by the Mahometan con- 
quest of India. See History of Hindustan, by 
Alexander Dow, or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 151, 

12. The vigor of the English tongue in the sixteenth cen- 
tury is depicted by H. R. Cleveland in his Reign 
of Elizabeth, or Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 

15. The substitution of England's rule and England's 

language for that of Holland in Cape Colony is 
detailed in the History of South Africa, by H. A. 
Bryden, or Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 127. 

16. The struggle between old politics and new policies is 

depicted in Wilhelm Mueller's Political History of 
Recent Times, or Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 1. 

18. The beginning of our nursery rhymes is to be found 
in the poetry of the old Aryans, such as the Rig 
Veda, which are illustrated in Sir W. W. Hunter's 
Brief History of the Indian People, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 57. 



XXI -LIFE'S INTERCOURSE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT WHEELER 

1. To what extent did Alexander's conquests fasten the Greek 

language upon the ancient world? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 141. 

2. How far did the Roman tongue aid in Romanizing Europe? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., pp. 265 and 362. 

3. How did the Greek tongue come to reassert itself as the 

official speech of the Roman Empire? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 320. 

4. How deep was Rome's impress upon Great Britain, as 

measured by language? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 285; Vol. IV., p. 
182. 

5. What record does the English language preserve of the chief 

historical modifications of the race? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 204. 

6. Of what value did the Greeks' ancient language prove to 

them in their war for freedom? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., pp. 1, 65, and 112. 

7. Through what agencies had this language been mainly 

altered? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 147; Vol. VIII., 
p. 55. 

8. What national influences moulded the French language? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 334; Vol. V., p. 276. 

9. When did it almost achieve supremacy as a world language? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xiii. 

10. What prevented its dominance? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 347. 



XXI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "LIFE'S INTERCOURSE," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XXI 

Page 

2, The story of Navarino and its effect is fully told by 

Harriet Martineau in her History of England, or 
Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 135. 

3. The struggle and survival of the Eastern or Greek 

Catholic Church are narrated by H. F. Tozer in 
The Church and the Eastern Empire, or Great Events, 
Vol. v., p. 189. 

3. The late Greek-Turkish war is described by Sir E. 

Ashmead-Bartlett in his Battlefields of Thessaly, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 208. 

4. For the importance which Rome and its language still 

hold in modern civilization see the Law Code of 
Justinian, or Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 138. 

5. The thoughts and language of Buddhism, with quoted 

examples, are given in Buddhism, by J. W. Rhys- 
Davids, or Great Events, Vol. I., p. 160. 

5. For the growth of the German language under the 

influence of the Reformation see J. Koestlin's Life 
of Luther, or Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 1. 

6. The difficulties confronting Austria-Hungary, with its 

two languages, are shown by C. A. Fyffe in his 
History of Modern Europe, or Great Events, Vol. 
XVIIL, p. 163. 

8. The attitude and feelings of the literature of ancient 
Greece are well illustrated in Plato's Phcedo. See 
Great Events, Vol. II., p. 87. 



XXII— THE BOY 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT GILMAN 

1. What ideas as to the teaching of youth were held in the 

ancient world? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 34. 

2. What was the Spartan system of training? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 181 et seq. 

3. What the Athenian? And what contrasting results were 

achieved by each of these? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 235 et seq.; Vol. 
II., p. 12. 

4. Are there any early historic instances of the value of home 

influence? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 259. 

5. To what extent did the father hold authority over the son 

under Roman law? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 148. 

6. When and under what conditions was a Roman youth 

judged old enough to assume his own guardianship? 
See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 157. 

7. When and under whom were schools first organized in 

modern civilization? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., pp. 366 and 368. 

8. What were the first efforts at education among the English 

people? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 78. 

9. Into what hands was the training of youth committed in 

mediaeval days? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 192. 

10. What was the condition of education in Elizabethan England? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 



XXII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE BOY/' SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXII 

Page. 

5. The earliest efforts to educate youths as indi\iduals are 

discussed in Comem'iis: His Life and Educational 
Works, by S. S. Lawrie, or Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 192, 

6. The development of Franklin from boyhood, and his re- 

markable career, are detailed in Comj)lete Works of 
Benjamin Franklin, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 130. 

7. The attempt of Pestalozzi to train children by sympathy, 

practically the beginning of modern education, is 
described in Pestalozzi's Method of Education, by George 
Ripley, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 364. 

8. The arrested development of the Emperor Charles V., 

and his slow advance to the maturity of his power, 
are described in History of the Reign of Charles V., by 
W. Robertson, or Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 34S. 

8. The story of Sir Richard Church and the aid extended 
by him to the Greeks in their war of independence is 
narrated in Greece in the Nineteenth Century, by Lewis 
Sergeant, or see Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 65. 

13. The words and teachings of St. Paul are enlarged on in 
Origin of Christianity, by I. M. Wise, or Great Events, 
Vol. II., p. 88. 

16. Something of the wonders achieved by modern astronomy 
is suggested in Pioneers of Science, by Sir Oliver 
Lodge, or Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 25. 



XXllI-HOW TO THINK 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY DR. HALE 

1. How do the underlying principles of Asiatic or Eastern 

thought differ from those of the West? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxvii. 

2. What effect has this difference had in deciding the his- 

tory of East and West? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 161. 

3. What is the spirit of fatalism which underlies Mahometan 

thought? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 237 et seq. 

4. What effect has this had on the career of the Mahometan 

races? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 247. 

o. What were the teachings of St. Paul as to the freedom of 
thought and will? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 74 et seq. 

6. What has been the usual attitude of the Christian Church 

upon this doctrine? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 300 et seq. 

7. Has memory played any appreciable part in the develop- 

ment of art? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 1 10. 

8. Of music? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 32 et seq. 

9. Into what terrible tragedy did uncontrolled imagination 

lead the early Puritans? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 268. 

10. In what well-known warfare did a vigorous use of the 
imagination lead to success? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 334. 



XXIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "HOW TO THINK," see as follows: 

Lecture XXIII 

PAGE 

1. The days of Dr. Samuel Johnson and his friends are 
well described by Justin McCarthy, in his History 
of the Four Georges, or in Great Events, Vol. XIII., 
p. 117. 

3. The teachings of the Apostle Paul are pointed out by 

I. M. Wise in his Origin of Christianity, or in Great 
Events, Vol. III., p. 69. 

4. The thoughts of Mr. Ruskin as to art and its origin 

are exemplified in his Stones of Venice. See Great 
Events, Vol. IV., p. 95. 

5. The power of man to control and guide his will was 

preached in England as early as the days of the 
Venerable Bede; see his Ecclesiastical History of 
Britain, or Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 182, 

6. That man may train his memory long after he has lost 

the plasticity of childhood is shown in the story of 
Alfred the Great, by Thomas Hughes. See Great 
Events, Vol. V., p. 49. 

7. For the tragic fate of Louis XVI. and 'his unhappy 

son consult Guizot's Popular History of France, 
or Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 311. 



XXIV-THE GIRL 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. REID 

1. What was the state of " society " in New England in colonial 

days? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 125. 

2. What in the Southern States? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 81. 

3. In what way were the " seriousness and faith " of our ances- 

tors proven? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 303; Vol. XII., 
p. 153. 

4. Into what great tragedy did the delusion of " equality " lead 

mankind? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 295. 

5. To what dangerous political extremes have the United 

States been already led? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 20 et seq. 

6. Where, before our own days, did the desire for amusement 

rise to even higher extravagance? 

See Great Events, Vol. IL, p. 301; Vol. TIL, p. 
265. 

7. Was it the dominant purpose of the French noblesse in the 

eighteenth century? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xiii, 

8. How have the United States disturbed the law of nations by 

over-sympathy with Ireland? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 325. 

9. How has Ireland deserved that sympathy? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 84. 

10. What were the chief dangers of the reconstruction period in 
the United States? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. xviii. 



^ 



XIV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE GIRL," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXIV 

Page 

2. The number and influence of the lawyers engaged in 

forming the American Union are shown by Andrew 
Young in his American Statesman, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIV., p. 173. 

3. The " excesses of Democracy " are illustrated by James 

Parton in his Life of Andrew Jackson, or Great 
Events, Vol. XVI., p. 143. 

5. The change of type which has come over the American 
nation may be seen by reading C. W. Elliott's 
The New England History, or Great Events, Vol. 
XII., p. 241. 

8. The steadiness in a political policy displayed by the 
American colonists is described by James Grahame 
in his History of the Rise and Progress of the United 
States, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 289. 

8. The readiness for change inherent in French politics 
is shown by Lamartine in his History of the Restora- 
tion of Monarchy in France, or Great Events, Vol. 
XVI., p. 207. 

8. The prominence of various other factions in American 

politics at the time of the formation of the Republi- 
can party is pointed out by Lincoln in the Lincoln 
and Douglas Debates. See Great Events, Vol. XVII., 
p. 256. 

9. The tale of the late Spanish- American war is told by 

H. H. Bancroft in The New Pacific, and by A. S. 
Draper in The Rescue of Cuba. See Great Events, 
Vol. XIX., pp. 227 and 235. 

11. A full account of the various efforts to build a Panama 
canal is given by A. M. Law in a monograph on 
the subject. See also the speech of Senator Depew, 
or Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 360. 



XXV— MANHOOD 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT ANDREWS 

1. What limitations were imposed upon the selection of one's 

life-work among the ancient Egyptians? 
See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxv. 

2. How, in mediaeval days, did the Feudal system affect the 

free choice of a career? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 4. 

3. What preparations were then required for entering the 

ministry? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 231; Vol. IX., p. 27. 

4. What training had the early Protestant ministers? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p.l76. 

5. Under what denomination did preaching become almost 

wholly dissociated from preliminary training? 
See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 57. 

6. What was the status of the legal profession in Roman times? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 140. 

7. Why and when were the Americans called "a nation of 

lawyers"? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xxv. 

8. What was the position of the medical profession in mediaeval 

days? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 51 et seq. 

9. When did " business " or trade become the chief means of 

accumulating wealth? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. xvi. 

10. What warlike qualities were then demanded of the man of 

commerce? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. 214. 



XXV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "MANHOOD," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXV 

Page 

2. For the fitness of Robert E. Lee for the profession of 
arms see Rossiter Johnson's History of the War of 
Secession, or Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 53. 

2. The most celebrated example of a man pursuing a 

single overmastering ambition from childhood is 
that of Alexander the Great. See Creasy's Fifteen 
Decisive Battles of the World, or Great Events, Vol. 
IL, p. 14L 

3. The life of Bach shows us a musician similarly secure 

of his intent. See H. Tipper's The Growth and In- 
fluence of Music, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 31. 

3. Caesar is often quoted as one whose early career of 

debauchery gave no indication of his later power, 
as is shown by Napoleon III. in his History of Julius 
CoBsar, or Great Events, Vol. II. , p. 267. 

4. For a man wholly misunderstanding his own abilities 

and finding his mission by accident, we have Clive. 
See Lord Clive, by Sir A. J. Arbuthnot, or Great 
Events, Vol. XIII., p. 185. 

5. As an example of a man driven by inward compulsion 

to a life wholly different from his original plans, 
see Loyola and Jesuitism, by Isaac Taylor, or Great 
Events, Vol. IX., p. 261. 

11. A teacher following his instinctive bent from child- 
hood is shown in Ripley's monograph on Pesta- 
lozzi, or Great Events, Vol. XIII. , p. 364. 



XXVI -THE COLLEGE GRADUATE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT THWING 

1. What nation formed the great business people of antiquity? 

See Great Events, VoL IL, p. 179. 

2. How did the wild Teutons who overthrew the Roman 

world learn to be men of business? 

See Great Events, VoL IL , p. 364 ct seq. 

3. What was the social position of the merchant in mediaeval 

days, and to what extent was he apt to be a man of 

culture? 

See Great Events, VoL VIL, p. 6. 

4. Where and how did modern business men first rise to con- 

trol the government of their state? 

See Great Events, VoL VL, p. xvi. 

5. In what sense were the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth 

century economic victories? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 266; VoL VIII., 
p. 299. 

6. When and how did the frenzy of speculation sweep the 

aristocracy into "business"? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., pp. 1 and 22. 

7. Has any age before our own felt the difficulties of over- 

education? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. xiii. 

8. To what extent did "tradesmen" control the American 

Revolution? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 289. 

9. What was the first great economic victory of the past cen- 

tury on land? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 94. 

10. What victories have been achieved over the ocean? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 159; VoL XVIII., 
p. 175. 



XXVI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE COLLEGE GRADUATE," see 

AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXVI 

Page 

2. The first invention and employment of the steam loco- 
motive are described by Samuel Smiles in his Life 
of George Stephenson, or Great Events, Vol. XVL, 
p. 157. 

2. The greatest of American railroad achievements is de- 
tailed by J. P. Davis in The Union Pacific Railway, 
or Great Events, Vol. XVIIL, p. 287. 

2. For the first establishment of banking institutions in 

America consult Hamilton and Lewis' History of 
the Bank of North America, or Great Events, Vol. 
XIV., p. 230. 

3. The beginnings of modern education are to be found 

detailed in S. S. Laurie's Comenius, or Great Events, 
Vol. XL, p. 192. 

4. For the early successes of engineering before it was an 

established profession see Andrew D. White's Riche- 
lieu, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 129. 

6. The first awakening of Englishmen to the value of 
secular education is described by J. R. Green in his 
History of the English People, or Great Events, Vol. 
IX., p. 137. 

9. The beginning of an intellectual study of the fine arts 
appears with the Renaissance. See The Medici and 
the Italian Renaissance, by W. Smeaton, or Great 
Events, Vol. VIIL, p. 134. 

11. The nature of the power and triumphs of Gladstone 
is outlined by Justin McCarth}^ in his Epoch of Re- 
form, or Great Events, Vol. XVIL, p. 11. 



XXVII- SPORT 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT CLEVELAND 

1. When were hunting and fishing still the business of the 

majority of men, instead of being merely sport? 
See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxi. 

2. What were the chief sports encouraged among the Greeks? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 199. 

3. How were these given religious sanction? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 181. 

4. What effect did these physical exercises of the Greeks have 

upon the history of the world? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 185. 

5. What were the sports of ancient Rome? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 273. 

6. To what extent were sports approved by the early Christian 

Church? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 329. 

7. How did William the Conqueror arrange ground for hunting 

in the early days of England? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 245. 

8. What was the chief sport of the yeomen of England, and of 

what value did it prove? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., pp. 78 and 320. 

9. When did the Church in England place itself in flat opposi- 

tion to sport, and what was the result upon the English 
nation? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 378. 

10. What effect did existence on the edge of a wilderness have 
upon the love of " sport " in colonial America ? 
See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 125. 



XXVII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "SPORT," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXVII 

Page 

1. The aptitude of our Southern ancestors in sport of 
every kind is shown in W. Sargent's History of an 
Expedition against Fort Du Quesne, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIII., p. 163. 

1. The earliest modern recognition of the beauty and joy 
of outdoor life is described by J. Burckhardt in his 
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, or Great 
Events, Vol. VII., p. 93. 

3. For evidence that the early kings of England were 
eager sportsmen it is only necessary to consult the 
old Domesday Book, or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 242. 

3. The extravagant excesses to which devotion to sport 

may lead is illustrated by the career of Commodus, 
as narrated in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, or Great Events, Vol. III., p. 263. 

4. The relative prowess shown in our Civil War by the 

Northern soldiers as opposed to the Southrons, with 
their open-air life, is pointed out by Horace Gree- 
ley in The American Conflict, or Great Events, Vol. 
XVIIL, p. 26. 

5. Striking evidence of the advantage of physical ac- 

tivity and alertness was furnished by the success of 
the Japanese itti their recent war. See the mono- 
graph on The Russo-Japanese War, by Charles F. 
Home, or Great Events, Vol. XIX, p. 381. 



XXVIII-THE TOILERS 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT WRIGHT 

1. What was the position of labor in the Middle Ages? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., pp. xiii and xvi; Vol. 
VIII., p. XIII. 

2. What early, unsuccessful revolts did the laboring classes 

attempt, and with what result? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. xxiii; Vol. VII., 
p. 164; Vol. IX., p. 93. 

3. Where and when did the great labor " guilds " rise to control 

nations? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., pp. 23 and 68. 

4. When and how did the participation of the lower classes in 

government begin in England? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. 246. 

5. In France? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 17. 

6. Was the French Revolution an uprising of the laboring 

classes? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIV., pp. xviii and 212. 

7. When and how did democracy, the power of the masses, 

become supreme in America? 

See Great Events, Vol. XV., p. xx at seq. 

8. When and through what strife did the common people 

secure some share of power in Europe? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. xiii at seq. 

9. To what extremes has the labor movement been driven in 

Germany? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 115 et seq. 

10. Under what new guise has the labor question appeared in 
connection with the Panama Canal? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 360. 



XXVIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE TOILERS," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XXVIIl 

Page 

1. The condition of the laboring masses in England in the 

eighteenth century is depicted by W. Lecky in his 
History of England in the Eighteenth Century, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIII. , p. 57. 

2. The position of the slaves in the Southern States is 

shown by J. K. Ingram in his History of Slavery and 
Serfdom^, or Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 296. 

3. The early efforts of the masses for recognition in the 

United States Government are pointed out by H. 
von Hoist in his Constitutional and Political History 
of the United States, or Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 18. 

3. The final success of the uneducated populace in secur- 
ing control of the American national government 
is described by James Parton in his Life of Andrew 
Jackson, or Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 143. 

6. The struggles of the English lower classes for an ade- 
quate share of government are narrated in the Con- 
stitutional History of England, by Sir Thomas May, 
or Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 252. 

12. The gradual rise of Socialism is detailed by Thomas 

Kirkup in his History of Socialism, or Great Events, 
Vol. XVIII., p. 141. 

13. The position of the serfs of Russia is described in a 

monograph by Andrew D. White, and in one by 
Turgenieff. See Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 353. 



J 



XXIX -THE SOIL 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. WALLACE 

1. When in ancient history was there an agricultural war? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 109. 

2. How did the land of Europe come into possession of the 

ancestors of the present owners? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 22. 

3. Under what system was it distributed and how paid for? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 1. 

4. What was the earliest armed rebellion in mediaeval times 

against the usurpers of the soil? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 164. 

5. What is the story of More's martyrdom? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., pp. 137 and 206. 

6. What were the effects of Rousseau's preachings of reform? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 153. 

7. How was the American Revolution associated with the 

French declaration of the Rights of Man? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xxiv. 

8. How has the " rapid growth of steam power " influenced the 

civilization of our own land? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 287. 

9. What was the first of the series of reform bills which have 

marked England's legislation in the past century? 
See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 175. 

10. What was the most important of these bills? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 252. 



XXIX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE SOIL," SEE AS follows: 

S66 

Lecture XXIX 
Page 

2. The earliest modern attempt at overturning the es- 
tablished order of society is described by Johann 
Neander in his History of the Christian Religion and 
Church, or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 340. 

2. The story of Wat Tyler's rebellion is told in Lingard's 
History of England, or Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 217. 

5. The confusion of all political theories consequent upon 
the Napoleonic wars is pointed out by William Haz- 
litt in his Life of Napoleon, or Great Events, Vol. XV., 
p. 76. 

7. The remarkable results from the nineteenth-century 
development of photography are detailed by W. J. 
Harrison in his History of Photography. See Great 
Events, Vol. XVI., p. 338. 

7. For the manner in which the hopes of the common 
people were betrayed after the overthrow of Napo- 
leon see Charles Maurice's Revolutionary Movements 
of 1848-1849, or Great Events, Vol. XVI., p. 1. 

10. The blind persistence of kingly faith in the doctrine of 
"divine right" is well shown in Knight's Popular 
History of England, or see Great Events, Vol. XL, 
p. 311. 

18. The story of the plundering of the abbeys by Henry 
VIII. is fully told by J. R. Green in his History of 
the English People, or Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 203. 

18. The Catholic view of this and similar transactions is 
given by Jean Audin in his Life of Luther, or Great 
Events, Vol. IX., p. 26. 



XXX-ANARCHISM 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY COUNT TOLSTOI 

1. What is Nihilism? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 71. 

2. When in European history has anarchy held open sway? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 93. 

3. What has been the most recent and tragic example of 

anarchy in full control of a great city? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 351. 

4. Has anarchy ever sprung from the highest instead of the 

lowest strata of society? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 259; Vol. III., p. 108. 

5. What conquerors have been most anarchistic in their sub- 

version of order? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., pp. 1 and 72. 

6. What was perhaps the hugest of slaughters caused solely 

by the selfish ambition of kings? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 169. 

7. Where is anarchism most prevalent to-day? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. xvi. 

8. What approach to anarchy has appeared in Germany? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 115. 

9. How was this met by Bismarck? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 1 16. 

10. When was Nihilism in Russia once upon the eve of armed 

revolt? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX,, p. 83 et seq. 



XXX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "ANARCHISM," see as follows: 

See 

Lecture XXX 

Page 

1. The trial and execution of Louis XVI. are powerfully 
described in Carlyle's History of the French Revo- 
lution. See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 295. 

1. The story of Maximilian's struggle in Mexico and of 

his death is told by his Aide, Prince Salm-Salm, in 
My Diary in Mexico in 1867. See Great Events, 
Vol. XVIII., p. 186. 

2. The eventful career of Henry IV. of France is recorded 

in the Memoirs of his trusted comrade, the Due de 
Sully, extracts from which are in Great Events, 
Vol.'X., p. 276. 

3. The tragedy of Russian slaughter at Plevna is told by 

William Mueller in his Political History of Recent 
Times, or in Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 1. 

3. The unfortunate results of Italy's colonization at- 
tempts in Abyssinia are described in a special 
monologue by Frederick A. Edwards. See Great 
Events, Vol. XIX., p. 194. 

5. The invasion of China consequent upon the Boxer 
tumults is described by W. A. Martin in his Siege 
of Pekin, or in Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 333. 

9. The causes which led to the restoration of Charles II. 
and the feeling of the English people toward Crom- 
well are portrayed in the Diary of Samuel Pepvs. 
See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 357. 



XXXI-WAR 

QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT JORDAN 

1. Who was the earliest historic leader famous for works of 

peace instead of conquest? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 92. 

2. How was a general peace once established and maintained 

throughout the civilized world? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xii. 

3. What disrupted this? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xvii. 

4. How did the "spirit of equaHty" perish at Philippi? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 348. 

5. How did Caesar try to make up for the decay of Roman 

men? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 317. 

6. How did the early Christians uphold their doctrine of peace? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 240. 

7. When did the Church definitely declare for warfare and 

employ the sword? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 276. 

8. What was the greatest of rehgious wars? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 62. 

9. What sovereign next to Napoleon did most to destroy 

France by destroying her stronger men? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xiv. 

10. What was probably the most awful holocaust in the world? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 402. 



XXXI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "WAR," SEE AS follows: 

Sec 

Lecture XXXI 

Page 

2. The character and wisdom of Franklin may be gathered 

from Bigelow's Complete Works of Benjamin Frank- 
lin, or Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 130. 

3. The founding of Philadelphia by the Quakers and the 

adoption of its name are described by G. E. Ellis 
in his William Penn, or Great Events, Vol. XII., 
p. 153. 

7. The tale of the early Roman republic and its mighty 

men has been often told. The Roman, Livy, is our 
best early authority in his History of Rome. See Great 
Events, Vol. II., p. 224. 

8. The change in Rome from the " spirit of freedom " to 

that of domination is recognized and described by 
the Roman, Lucius Florus, in his Epitome of Roman 
History, or Great Events, Vol. II., p. 179. 

9. The wickedness of Nero and the Roman aristocracy 

is depicted by Farrar in his Early Days of Chris- 
tianity, or Great Events, Vol. III., p. 134. 

10. The story of Romulus Augustulus and the feebleness of 
the last days of Rome is told by Bury in his History 
of the Later Roman Empire, and by Gibbon in his 
Decline and Fall. See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 364, 
and Vol. IV., p. 1. 

16. Of the many recent histories of Napoleon consult the 
one quoted here, or that of Pierre Lanfrey. See Great 
Events, Vol. XV., p. 115. 

16. The Moscow campaign is fully described by Fyffe in his 
History of Modern Europe, or Great Events, Vol. 
XV., p. 231. 



XXXII - ARBITRATION 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY MR. CARNEGIE 

1. Into what wars was Pericles forced against his will? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 34. 

2. How did Cicero, the preacher against war, become involved 

in its strife? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 345. 

3. How did the Christian doctrine of submission shift to one 

of armed compulsion? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 289. 

4. What was the attitude toward the early Church assumed 

by "Julian the Apostate"? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 333. 

5. Did Luther endeavor to bring peace to man? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 1. 

6. What was the extent of his success? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 93. 

7. What was the Amphictyonic council of the Greeks, and 

what were its efforts toward arbitration? 
See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 181. 

8. How did the Alabama claims arise? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 124. 

9. Why was their settlement specially important in the his- 

tory of Arbitration? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIII., p. 367. 

10. What was the feeling of the mass of Chinamen during the 
Peking siege of the legations? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 324. 



XXXII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "ARBITRATION," see as follows: 

See 
Lecture XXXII 
Page 

3. The views of Homer upon war, and the story of the 
Trojan war, are given in Grote's History of Greece. 
See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 70. 

5. The story of Josephus and of the wars into which he 
was plunged are best told by the hero himself in his 
The Jewish War, or Great Events, Vol. III., p. 150. 

7. Pen pictures of most of the " Fathers of the Church " 

may be read in A. P. Stanley's History of the Eastern 
Church, or Great Events, Vol. III., p. 299. 

8. For the difficulties between Philip of France and John 

of England, and the character of Pope Innocent's 
interference, see John Lackland, by Kate Norgate, 
or Great Events, Vol. VI., p. 86. 

11. The life and death of the great Swedish King are 
described in the History of Gustavus Adolphus, by 
Benjamin Chapman, or Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 174. 

15. The lack of a declaration of war in the late Russo- 
Japanese struggle is discussed in a monograph by 
Charles F. Home, or see Great Events, Vol. XIX., 
p. 381. 

18. For the peace conference at The Hague consult the 
monograph by Thomas Erskine Holland, or Great 
Events, Vol. XIX., p. 282. 

21. The Boer war and its disasters are officially detailed 
by Sir A. Conan Doyle in The Great Boer War, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 296. 



XXXIII -HISTORY 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT HAZARD 

1. Who was the Father of Historians? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 354. 

2. In what earlier forms were the records of man preserved? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxii. 

3. When did history begin to moralize? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 68; Vol. III., p. 1. 

4. Why is the period of the Reformation usually treated as 

the beginning of modern history? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. xiii. 

5. In what relation does American history stand to that of 

the world at large? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. xxiv; Vol. XIV., 

p. XIV. 

6. What was the character of the men who wrote our own 

early histories? 

See Great Events, Vol. XI., p. 93. 

7. What was the earliest account of the British colonies in 

America? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 211. 

8. What were the main events in the establishment of the 

Spanish-American colonies? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., pp. 72, 156, 254, 277; 
Vol. X., p. 70. 

9. In the founding of the French settlements? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 366; Vol. XL, p. 232; 
Vol. XII., pp. 108, 248, and 297. 

10. Why has Charles Stuart been made the subject of so many 
Scottish songs? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIII., p. 117. 



XXXIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN ''HISTORY," SEE AS follows: 

Sec 
Lecture XXXIII 
Page 

2. The character of Sir Philip Sydney is portrayed by 
W. R. Cleveland in his monograph on The Reign of 
Elizabeth, or in Great Events, Vol. X., p. 8. 

2. For the vigorous quality of Macaulay's style consult 
any of his works, or Great Events, Vol. XI., pp. 223 
and 311. 

4, The splendid stories of Swiss heroism are preserved in 
The Model Republic, by F. Grenfell Baker, or see 
Great Events, Vol. VIL,~pp. 28 and 238. 

4. The Scotch struggle for liberty under Sir William 

Wallace is described in the History of Scotland by 
Sir Walter Scott. See Great Events, Vol. VL, p. 
369. 

5. The later struggle which culminated at Bannockburn 

is detailed by Andrew Lang in A History of Scotland, 
or in Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 41. 

6. For the tragic tale of the plundering of Poland see 

James Fletcher's History of Poland, or Great Events, 
Vol. XIIL, p. 313. 

6. The final downfall of Poland is also described by Sir 

A. Alison in his History of Europe, or in Great Events, 
Vol. XIV., p. 330. 

7. The most noted of the histories of Motley is his Rise 

of the Dutch Republic. See Great Events, Vol. X., 
p. 202. 



XXXIV -THE POWER OF RELIGION 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PROFESSOR BALDWIN 

1. What was the earhest known form of reUgion? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxv. 

2. How did it assert its power over the ancient world? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 14. 

3. What was the first proselyting faith? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xv, 

4. What faith has owed its spread chiefly to the sword? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. xvii et seq. 

5. How did religion lessen the fall of the Roman civilization? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 17. 

6. How did the Roman Pope gain political rule over Rome 

and the surrounding territory? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 332. 

7. When did religion assume official control of the state 

affairs of Europe? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 231. 

8. When did it cease to be the foremost question in statecraft? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. xiii. 

9. Why is the peace of Westphalia accepted as ending the 

great religious wars? 

See Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 285. 

10. What was the last sectarian war fought directly in the 
name of the Christian faith? 

See Great Events, Vol. XVIIL, p. 316. 



XXXIV 

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE POWER OF RELIGION," 

SEE AS follows: 

Lecture XXXIV 
Page 

3. The beginnings of modern government in America 
are detailed by Charles Campbell in his History of 
Virginia, or in Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 76. 

3. Its beginnings in France are well summarized by 
William Hazlitt in his Life of Napoleon, or in Great 
Events, Vol. XIV., p. 212. 

5. A full account of the Holy Alliance and its downfall 
is given by C. E. Maurice in his Revolutionary 
Movements of 18Jf8-Jf9',0Y inGreat Events, Vol. XVI., 
p. L 

13. The unity of spirit that pervaded Europe in the 
Middle Ages is pointed out in the History of Latin 
Christianity, by H. H. Milman, or Great Events, 
Vol. VII., p. 201. 

15. The racial spirit kept alive in Greece by the church 
during the centuries of [subjection is described by 
Finlay in his History of Greece, or in Great Events, 
Vol. VIIL, p. 55. 

18. The enforced union of Ireland with England and the 
accompanying religious difficulties are narrated 
by William O'Connor Morris in his Ireland, or in 
Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 1. 

18. The beginnings of the religious breach between Rome 
and the French Church are detailed by Rene 
Rohrbacher in his Histoire universelle de VEglise 
Catholique, or in Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 378. 

20. The colonial policy of France in the Far East is dis- 
cussed by Sir Robert Douglas in his Europe and 
the Far East, or in Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 120. 

28. The career of England in Egypt is fully reviewed by 
J. F. Bright in his History of England, or in Great 
Events, Vol. XIX., p. 86. 



XXXV— CHRISTIANITY AND 
CIVILIZATION 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY COMMISSIONER HARRIS 

1. What is the origin of human society? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxi. 

2. What has been the extremest form of "paternal" legisla- 

tion? 

See Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 119. 

3. .What was the position of Egypt in the history of religion? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 2. 

4. Where occurred the earliest known development of an- 

cestor worship? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 270. 

5. When did the spirit of love become the dominant note of 

religion? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 160. 

6. What new ideas did Christianity add to man's religious 

thought? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. xv. 

7. When was the first authoritative decision established set- 

ting bounds and laws to the Christian faith? 
See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 299. 

8. What addition to the body of Christian faith was made 

by St. Bernard? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 340. 

9. What was the real nature of the addition made by the 

Reformation? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. xiii. 

10. What was the counter-Reformation within the Catholic 

Church? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 293. 



XX 



XV 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZA- 
TION," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXXV 
Page 

3. The influence of Voltaire upon Christianity is dis- 

cussed by John Morlev in his Voltaire, or in Great 
Events, Vol. XIII., p. 144. 

4. A vivid account of the Reign of Terror may be found 

in Guizot's Popular History of France. See Great 
Events, Vol. XIV., p. 311. 

5. The early struggles of polygamy to establish itself in 

the United States are detailed by T. L. Kane in The 
Mormons, or in Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 94. 

7. The strife between Islamism and the holders of the 

Brahmanic faiths of India is described by Alex- 
ander Dow in his History of Hindustan, or in Great 
Events, Vol. V., p. 151. 

8. The incidents of Mahomet's early career are given by 

Washington Irving in Mahomet and His Successors, 
or in Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 198. 

11. The early Israelite attitude toward religious faith is 
shown in H. H. Milman's History of the Jews, or 
in Great Events, Vol. I., p. 92. 

13. The story of St. Dominic and of his missionary labors 
leading to the enforcement of the Inquisition is 
told by W. H. Rule in his History of the Inquisition, 
or in Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 166. 

13. The Catholic view of these same events is given by 
J. Balmes in his European Civilization, or in Great 
Events. Vol. VIII., p. 182. 



XXXVl-THE MYSTERIES 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OP COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENT BARRETT 

1. Has the Christian Church in the past accepted the teach- 

ings of those who would bring science to its aid? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 285; Vol. XL, 
p. 184. 

2. What has been its attitude toward seers of visions, ghosts, 

and similar experiences? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., pp. 251 and 292; 
Vol. IV., p. 128. 

3. To what extent have these "manifestations" been ac- 

cepted by other faiths? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., pp. 94, 162, and 273; 
Vol. III., p. 247. 

4. What great religious order had its foundation in a vision? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 261. 

5. To what ^tent were the apostles of Christ affected by 

visiondf 

See Great Events, Vol. III., pp. 42 and 46. 

6. What amount of faith had the ancient Hebrews in their 

prophets? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 160. 

7. What marked examples can we find in ancient history of 

that sympathy between a man and his age of which 
President Barrett speaks? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., pp. xvi and xxi. 

8. What in later history? 

See Great Events, Vol. VI., p. xiv; Vol. VII., 
p. 2; Vol. VIII., p. 134. 

9. What mighty visions stand at the basis of the Buddhist 

faith? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 164. 

10. Of the Mahometan? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 234. 



XXXVI 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE MYSTERIES/' see as follows: 

See 
Lecture XXXVI 
Page 

3. The "assault on the outworks of rehgion" as it was 
begun in Scotland is described by P. H. Brown in 
his History of Scotland, or in Great Events, Vol. X., 
p. 21. 

3. The assault as begun in France is described by A. M. 
Fairbairn in his Calvin and the Reformed Church, or 
in Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 176. 

3. The strong inherent tendency of man to be influenced 

by authority in matters of faith is illustrated in Lec- 
tures on Mediceval Church History, by R. C. Trench, 
or see Great Events, Vol. VII., pp. 284 and 294. 

4. The wholly inexplicable character of some of the ap- 

pearances which led the mediaeval ages to reject 
the conclusions of far-sighted seekers after truth is 
emphasized in the letters of Columbus. See Great 
Events, \o\.Nlll., p. 224. 

5. The story of the discovery of the mystic force of gravi- 

tation is told by Sir David Brewster in his Life of Sir 
Isaac Newton, or in Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 51. 

11. A remarkable example of the laws of attraction and 
their scientific study occurred in the discovery of 
Neptune. See Sir Oliver Lodge's Pioneers of Science, 
or Great Events, Vol. XVII., p. 25. 

15. The similar fear which retarded the introduction of 
vaccination is described by Sir T. Pettigrew in his 
Medical Portrait Gallery, or in Great Events, Vol. 
XIV., p. 363. 



J 



XXXVII --HYPNOTISM 



QUESTIONS 



LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY DR. HAYS 

1. What are the earliest historical evidences of the undue 

power of one niind upon another? 

SeeGEEAT Events, Vol. I., pp. 4 and 9. 

2. What is the most recent work written with faith in " witch- 

craft" as opposed to "suggestion"? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 200. 

3. What mystic ceremonies have long been practised by the 

Brahmins of India? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 65. 

4. What mystic results were attained among the Hebrews? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 100; Vol. III., p. 73. 

5. Should hypnosis be considered as explaining any of the 

phenomena in the early Christian Church? 
See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 254. 

6. What hypnotic frenzy was well recognized among the 

Greeks? ,^ , , ,^, 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 191. 

7. By what appeals to superstition did Attila control his 

Hunnish hordes? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 79. 

8. What remarkable sympathetic or hypnotic disease spread 

through Europe in the Middle Ages? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 188. 

9. What more recent manifestations have been seen of similar 

character? 

. See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 187. 

10. What were the views and the method of Paracelsus upon 

these hypnotic cases? 

See Great Events, Vol. VII., p. 198 



[^ 



VII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "HYPNOTISM," SEE AS follows: 

See 
Lecture XXXVII 
Page 

3. The history of the Greek Church and its separation 
from the Roman is told by H. F. Tozer in his The 
Church and the Eastern Empire, or in Great Events, 
Vol. v., p. 189. 

3. Some account of the hypnotic effects noted in medise- 
val days is given by J. F. Hecker in his Epidemics 
of the Middle Ages, or in Great Events, Vol. VII., 
p. 187. 

7. Most celebrated of the sarcastic plays directed against 
the medical profession are those of Moliere described 
by H. Van Laun in his History of French Literature, 
or in Great Events, Vol. XL, p. 347. 

17. An account of Henry Clay's remarkable services and 
speeches is given in the monograph on the Missouri 
Compromise, by J. A. Woodburn, or see Great 
Events, Vol. XVL, p. 14. 

23. For the signs and evidences of suffering attested by 
saints of mediaeval days see Villari's History of 
Girolamo Savonarola, or Great Events, Vol. VIII. , 
p. 265. 

23. The impressions made upon Loyola by his sorrows 
are described by I. Taylor in his Loyola and Jesuit- 
ism, or in Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 261. 



XXXVIII -THE WILL 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING OCvT THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY M. FINOT 

1. What ancient mler was specially noted for his strength of 

will? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 313. 

2. Through what trials of the will did Gautama Buddha pass 

before discovering his faith? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 163. 

3. Through what intensest trial of will did Jesus pass tri- 

umphant? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 23. 

4. What firm power of will was displayed by Socrates? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 106. 

5. What evidence did the Romans give that the entire race 

were strong of will? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. 187 et seq. 

6. What masses of men proved their devotion in opposition 

to the Romans? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., pp. 222, 231, and 246. 

7. How did Charlemagne face the approach of age? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 368. 

8. What great English king persisted despite almost super- 

human obstacles? 

See Great Events, Vol. V., p. 49. 

9. When has an entire modern nation bid defiance to suffer- 

ing? 

See Great Events, Vol. X., p. 145. 

10. What one man, unaided, by sheer will power revolution- 
ized a nation? 

See Great Events, Vol. XII., p. 223. 



XXXVIII 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OP SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE WILL," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXXVIII 

Page 

2. A good account of the Empress Josephine is given by 
William Hazlitt in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 
or in Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 76. 

2. The legends of ancient Rome are detailed and dis- 
cussed by Niebuhr in his History of Rome, or in 
Great Events, Vol. I., p. 116. 

4. Homer's tales of Troy are given in condensed form 
by Grote in his History of Greece, or in Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 70. 

7. The character of the Mexican civilization is described 
by Prescott in his History of the Conquest of Mexico, 
or in Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 72. 

7. The Egyptian civilization is portrayed in G. C. C. 
Maspero's Birth of Civilization, or Great Events, 
Vol. I., p. 1. 

7. For the career of Thiers consult Lamartine's History 
of the Restoration of Monarchy in France and 
Guizot's History of France, or Great Events, Vol. 
XVI., p. 207, and Vol. XVIL, p. 137. 

7. For the career of Macmahon consult Von Moltke's 
Franco-German War and Hanotaux's Contemporary 
France, or see Great Events, Vol. XVIII. , pp. 302 
and 351. 

15. The tragic tale of France's shame at Panama was 
outlined by Senator Depew in a speech in Congress, 
or see Great Events, Vol. XIX., p. 360. 



XXXIX -THE HOPE 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY SIR HENRY THOMPSON 

1. What seems to have been the earUest impression acquired 

by man as to the powers outside himself? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. xxiii et seq. 

2. What ancient people showed themselves most dissatisfied 

with the human life around them? 

See Great Events, Vol. I., p. 165. 

3. What people were most happy to live their lives on earth, 

and ignored the Beyond? 

See Great Events, Vol. II., p. xiii. 

4. In what lay the peculiar power of Christianity's appeal to 

a future life? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 70 et seq. 

5. Hew did this come to be emphasized by the apostles? 

See Great Events, Vol. III., p. 52. 

6. What influence had the idea of a future life upon the 

Mahometans? 

See Great Events, Vol. IV., p. 247. 

7. At what period did the belief and planning for a future 

life lead men almost wholly to ignore the present one? 
See Great Events, Vol. VII., pp. 18 and 22, 

8. When did they become rearoused to the joy and worth of 

our present existence? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. 134 et seq. 

9. How did the joy of life invade the Catholic Church, and 

with what unfortunate results? 

See Great Events, Vol. VIII., p. xxiii, 

10. How did it ally itself to the forces of the Reformation? 

See Great Events, Vol. IX., pp. 128 and 137. 



XXXIX 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "THE HOPE," SEE AS follows: 

See 

Lecture XXXIX 

Page 

5. For the anthropomorphic conceptions of their gods 

by the early races see Hammurabi's Law Code, 
or Great Events, Vol. I., p. 14. 

6. The condition of Jewish ceremonial in religion at the 

time of Christ is described by Renan in his The 
Apostles, or in Great Events, Vol. III., p. 40. 

6. The formation of the Eastern Church and growth of 
its doctrines are detailed by J. L. Mosheim in his 
Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, or in Great Events, 
Vol. III., p. 299. 

6. The spread of this Eastern Church through Russia is 

described in A History of the Church of Russia, by 
Andre Mouravieff, or in Great Events, Vol. V., p. 128. 

7. The progress of the Roman Papacy to the leadership 

of Europe is depicted by A. R. Pennington in The 
Church in Italy, or Great Events, Vol. V., p. 231. 

7. The circumstances of the establishment of the Angli- 
can Church in England are given by John Richard 
Green in his History of the English People, or in 
Great Events, Vol. IX., p. 203. 

9. The character of the Koran is illustrated in Simon 
Ockley's History of the Saracens, or see Great Events, 
Vol. IV., p. 198. 

9. The brightest flowering and the decay of the Mahome- 
tan power are depicted by S. A. Dunham in his 
History of Spain and Portugal, or in Great Events^ 
Vol. v., p. 256. 



XL- OUR GOAL 



QUESTIONS 

LEADING TO A COURSE OF COLLATERAL READING ON THE 
THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY PRESIDENTS ALDERMAN 

AND HARRIS 

1. Where did the growth of the modern "citizen" begin? 

See Great Events, VoL V., p. xxiii. 

2. When did the merchant or middle class become the leaders 

in modern life? 

See Great Events, VoL XVIL, p. xiii et seq. 

3. What were the principles which Washington proclaimed 

in his Wall Street address and also in his Farewell? 
See Great Events, VoL XIV., p. 197. 

4. In what other land has republicanism also been accepted 

as " the final form of human society " ? 

See Great Events, VoL VIIL, p. 336. 

5. What did patriotism mean to the soldiers of Grant and 

Lee? 

See Great Events, VoL XVIII., pp. 26, 46, 77, and 

110. 

6. In what sense is education the cornerstone of democracy? 

See Great Events, VoL XIV., p. xiii. 

7. Whence has sprung the education of to-day? 

See Great Events, VoL XI., p. 192. 

8. By what world-benefiting deeds have Americans won 

glory for their country in the last seventy years? 

See Great Events, VoL XVII., pp. 1 and 265; 
Vol. XVIII., pp. 175 and 287. 

9. What is the most recent evidence of the increasing strength 

of republican government and the growing faith in 
universal brotherhood? 

See Great Events, VoL XIX., p. 352. 

10. What other voluntary federations has the pa^ century 

witnessed? 

See Great Events, VoL XVIL, p. 334; VoL XVIII, 

pp. 196 and 340. 



XL 



REFERENCES FOR FURTHER CONSULTATION 

FOR STANDARD ACCOUNTS OF SUBJECTS BROUGHT UNDER DIS- 
CUSSION IN "OUR GOAL," SEE AS follows: 

See 
Lecture XL ^^ 

Page J^^ 

4. The strong faith of the "fathers" in republicanism 
is shown by their labors on our Constitution as 
described by Story in his Commentaries, or Great 
Events, Vol. XIV., p. 173. 

4. For the victory with which Washington closed the 
Revolution see Dawson's Battles of the United 
States and Lord Cornwallis's Correspondence, or 
Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 97. 

6. The spirit of patriotism which stirred our ancestors 
may be read in the Works of John Adams, or of 
Franklin, Jay, and Laurens, or see Great Events, 
•^Vol. XIV., p. 137. 

6. The spirit of patriotism shown by the Russian peasan- 

try, even in their late disastrous war, may be 
gathered from the account of The Russo-Japanese 
War, by C. F. Home. See Great Events, Vol. XIX., 
p. 381. 

7. The enormous development of America's industries 

is illustrated by C. W. Dabney's monograph on The 
Cotton Plant. See Great Events, Vol. XIV., p. 271. 

9. The spreading interest in education undoubtedly 
begins with Pestalozzi's work. See the monograph 
on Pestalozzi by G. Ripley, or Great Events, Vol. 
XIII., p. 364. 

10. The principles of American democracy as laid down 
by its chief exponent, Jefferson, are given in his 
Works, or in Great Events, Vol. XV., p. 18. 

10. The contrast between these doctrines and Socialism 
may be gathered from Thomas Kirkup's History 
of Socialism, or Great Events, Vol. XVIII. , p. 141. 



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